Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDon
This video is a good introduction to what the benefits are, and here is a fair bit of information about it.
There is alot of technology out now that lets them do this quite easily, and it's all headend based they don't have to touch the last mile network at all.
As for them pushing all the bandwidth onto broadband, the end of the video talks about the new applications that will come from it, and one of the main ones is QAM sharing, which means that QAM's can be shared between switched video, vod, and data, so you could have a range of QAM's for each, and then some shared ones for overflow capacity which would be used by the service which had a higher bandwidth requirement at the time. You could probably also QOS the shared QAMs so switched video would take priority over vod which would take priority over data.
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Switched video is nothing new, and I know ntl looked at it a few years ago, but rejected it.
Theres no need for Virgin to go totally VOD. Once analogue is gone theres more bandwidth. Virgin want to do VOD for more HD as they can't get real time feeds of Sky's channels without paying for 1.5Gb/s fibre feeds for each channel to feed into one of the central headends. Virgin's ex telewest CTO made the big booboo when he stuck with Telewests choice of MPEG2 for their HD. It was a bad decision, one they will have to pay for with a lack of HD bandwidth until they do bring an appropriate stb out using the current appropriate encoding/decoding technology (a CTO should have been able to see that).
VOD is Virgins substitute for HD, at the moment.
A few years ago, the chiefy cheese of ITV said HD was a fad, and wouldn't take off. Hence ITV did not produce any HD content. They currently have zero HD archived material. The current chiefy cheese has acknowledged HD as here to stay and has decided ITV will have a HD channel - however they have no content, so can't launch a fulltime channel hence part time red button linking.
I wonder if Virgin are talking to ITV however as they could easily take ITV HD as its not encrypted.