said by motorola870:maybe I am getting cynical but what if when Verizon does the MPEG4 conversion they move almost their entire set of national HD MPEG2 channels to 3 to a QAM and free up even more space then most people are expecting?
They've already done this because there aren't many MPEG-2 channels distributed at bitrates higher than 3-to-a-QAM (~13 Mbps).
Very few channels have a bitrate higher than 13 Mbps on Verizon anymore. AXS.tv and HDNet Movies are the only two natively distributed MPEG-2 @ 13+ Mbps ones I can think of.
Verizon re-encodes some of the MPEG-4 distributed channels to 17 Mbps MPEG-2 though. It's been a while since I've checked but EPIX and ESPN were two examples of this. Pretty wasteful. Will be nice when they can just pass these on through because I doubt the ESPN and EPIX MPEG-4 satellite distribution feeds have bitrates as high as Verizon is re-encoding them to as MPEG-2.
