On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 10:53 AM, Tom Bongiorno <tbjr@bongohut.com> wrote:
.....
> Or we will get lucky and the cables cos will phase out MPEG2. We can only
> dream.
It will happen. Eventually. So that you can receive even
more shopping channels to fill the "dial" (one can never
have too many shopping channels).
I recall a rumor is that there is at least one small cable
provider that did H.264 only. And Comcast is trialing H.264
only in a test market (before rolling it out nationwide).
And almost all of the stunt 3D programming from a few years
ago was H.264 due to bandwidth requirements. "4K" will
be the same.
The issue is (mostly) deployed customer equipment. Early
gen STBs and 1st gen DTAs were MPEG2 only(*). Replacing
all of that equipment is expensive (not just for the STBs
themselves, but the consumer interactions). Over time a
lot of that equipment gets swapped out (and at least
some MSOs never hand out some device types again), so
the cost of consumer interactions does go down if you
wait long enough. While there is HE encoding equipment
costs, most newer encoders have H.264 (at least as an
option).
Note that some MSOs broadcast the "premiums" in H.264
(since the premiums required more advanced STBs anyway,
there was no specific downside, and the quality could be
better)
So, the day will come. Probably right before H.265
starts to take over and everyone asks why the cable cos
are not broadcasting in H.265 rather than the obsolete
H.264.
Gary
(*) And some consumer owned equipment (TiVo)
does not currently support H.264 (and I think some
of the older TiVo devices cannot be upgraded).
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