 eyetack
join:2002-09-05
Leicester, MA | reply to tzbear
Re: [CATV] Charter Killing Public Access TV in Eau Claire, WI The reason largely behind the move to a digital platform is to free up analog spectrum for additional services, including HD channels, and (hopefully) wide-band DOCSIS.
A single SD analog channel takes up about 6mHz of bandwidth. With digital compression, 10 SD channels can pretty easily fit in that same channel space. In the end, "basic" service probably will be the only thing clearly tunable with analog or ClearQAM. This will most likely be OTA broadcast channels, and certainly PACs ... also known as PEG channels in some markets.
In order to get even more bandwidth, almost every CableCo is implementing some sort of switched-digital system, and yes, this requires a digital receiver. You can think of that as a broadcast version of VOD. For instance, instead of transmitting 120 channels of digital video out to everyone, taking up 12 channel slots, there are 40 or 60 slots per VOD service group which will only have channels that people are actually watching. The process itself should be quite transparent to the end user. This also makes it easier to provide specialty channels and tiers of ethnic interest ... or any other "long tail" programming.
I'm interested to see where the Tru2Way standard will go with this, and until then, if the price of renting a digital box will fall and by how much.
IMHO, it beats trying to implement a dual-cable system which was much more common in some places back in the day.
And before anyone asks ... no, I don't own a television. |
