HD broadcasts on TV

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by MrBogey

I don't know of any real FTTH plans by the major cable providers. I do know they just started engineering equipment for the cable companies to DOCSIS over GPON. I know there's GPON equipment that will do an RF overlay (Verizon uses it, for one) but I don't believe any major cable provider is doing FTTH right now as they feel DOCSIS 3.0 on a HFC network is good enough. AT&T is doing FTTH in greenbuilds and Verizon is doing FTTH in both old and new neighborhoods but I don't know offhand of any major cable system doing FTTH, just HFC with DOCSIS 2.0 or 3.0.

Comcast ran fiber to my home (actually the whole neighborhood) in 2000. Not telephone or internet (wasn't even an option until a couple years following that). Just cable and actually fiber. Had a fiber to coax tranceiver in a box on the back of my house. There have been other areas where cable companies have done the same. My neighborhood (and town) were/are not unique.

Originally Posted by MrBogey

But yeah...it's all frequency blocks and modulation really. DirecTV has 5 satellites and x amount of frequencies per satellite. Their bandwidth is pretty fixed. Cable companies have the theoretical limit of the coax in their system and that's pretty well fixed. Having to deal with legacy analog chewing up a good chunk of their bandwidth they hope that forcing people into digital and going with SDV will free up enough bandwidth to offer more HD programming.

There are other ways to optimize cable that satellites don't have the option to do. One is the technique I mentioned above: only feeding actively requested channels into the neighborhood. Satellites can't do that.

Satellites can do "spatial" diversity and frequency re-use by using multiple spot beams. I know of a system direct broadcast system (though I decline to name names) that filed to do just that. (You do know there's more than just DirecTV and Dish (Echostar) in the U.S.?) However, satellites cannot realistically, in a commercial satellite, get the beams down to the size of a single neighborhood.

Originally Posted by MrBogey

Lower the bitrate...add channels. Or raise the bitrate and reduce channels. Just like XM and Sirius.

This is true for any open air (or space), RF based system. It's not necessarily true of closed medium systems. Remember, as a worst case scenario you can always run another fiber parallel to the first one... and a third one or a fourth one after that ... and on and on. This is not true of RF systems.

Originally Posted by MrBogey

Hopefully the bugs get worked out of IPTV as it'll scale really well to the needs of the end-user. Realistically you'll have as many channels as the backhaul can carry with the limit locally being only set to the maximum amount the bandwidth between you and the backhaul could support. Meaning you can have a network system of 200 1080p channels as only those channels being viewed by you and those on your node are under the total aggregate bandwidth to that node and all the channels you're currently watching are under the bandwidth total of your connection to the node.

I'm not too thrilled about IPTV. I see very little in the near future (next 10 years) that makes me believe IPTV will be better than the three most common modes now (OTA, satellite and cable).