said by Sammer:said by tschmidt:Except for live events there is no reason to "broadcast" by that I mean send the same programs to millions of households at the same time.
/tom
Theoretically true but both linear digital cable and IPTV have their advantages and disadvantages. Only about 30 (major broadcast and cable network) channels have really large viewership and with current technology it makes sense to provide them through linear digital cable. The several hundred channels that have relatively small viewership however waste a tremendous amount of bandwidth when provided in such a way and are much better suited to non-linear transmission such as IPTV.
There is currently technology to handle this. It is called SDV and assigns the less watched channels to a separate set of channels (in lieu of each channel having a fixed/dedicated channel. What happens is that if anyone on your node is tuned to one of the SDV supplied channels, the STB is told to watch it on SDV Channel X (and that channel is used by all the boxes on the node to watch the channel). If someone on another node tunes to a different SDV supplied channel, it may be delivered on SDV Channel X unlike non-SDV supported channels where all the nodes get it shown on Non-SDV channel Y (and that other channel is shown on Non-SDV channel Z).
