Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/t...cence-fee.html
In the article above regarding the licence fee, David Elstein stated that 2020 was when Standard Definition and Set Top Boxes would be going.
David Elstein is a former Executive for Sky and ITV.
I wonder how this will affect VM?
- Will TiVo become obsolete and/or cloud based?
- One good thing will be the removal of the general requirement to subscribe to the XL package to receive most non premium HD channels.
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I disagree with him. I base my statement on current technology and am taking in to account the likely improvement in technology. The simple fact is that no current distribution system offers the bandwidth required for *every* channel to go HD. Personally, I do not think that even with the next gen compression systems being touted now that there would be enough bandwidth.
Now, VM have the advantage that they can save bandwidth in an area by temporarily shutting down the broadcast of a channel to an area if no one is watching that channel in that area. Freeview and Sky cannot do this. Also bear in mind that all three companies have a *lot* of infrastructure (at least hundreds of millions, if not billions of pounds worth), so they are not going to change that anytime soon.
I think in the long term, STBs will become cloud based, but not for a long time. Virgin have several million STBs in use. They aren't going to junk them anytime soon.
As for removing the need to subscribe to a particular package to get channels. I doubt that's going anywhere. VM staff can correct me, but I believe the reason they do this is something to do with their billing system. Whatever the reason, I think if they truly wanted to remove the requirement for packages, they would.