4 megabytes/sec = 32 megabits/sec.

That’s a lot of bandwidth and a lot of storage, but is not necessary for HD video, as some corners of the internet are showing already (see the forums at doom9.org)

First, let’s review the most popular codecs for HD video, in particular the 3 video codecs allowed on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs: MPEG2, VC-1, and H.264.

MPEG2 on blue-laser discs is pretty much the same as the codec used on standard DVD. The compression ability is not great, but CPU requirements are low. So, to fit HD video inside MPEG2 will indeed take more space. I would say at least 10-20Mbps to get a “decent” stream of 720p. Maybe 25-30Mbps for 1080p

VC-1 (WMV-HD) and H.264, however, offer a much more compelling storage/bandwidth ratio. They do this at the expense of CPU, of course. So people will need higher end CPUs or a newer graphics card with offload capabilities to watch these kinds of videos.

Now, if you search the net, you will find a lot of people re-encoding their BluRay or HD-DVD titles from the massive 15GB-50GB discs down to 4GB and 8GB. They do this by shrinking the 1080p content to 720p and lowering the bitrate.

720p would be a great format to deliver HD streams on the internet. 1080p is currently overkill, but we could grow into it.

In my own experience, it’s not all that challenging to compress a 30GB 2 hour movie from MPEG2 1080i or 1080p down to a 4GB 720p H.264 video with a bitrate of between 3-6Mbps. What you end up with is an HD movie in the same storage footprint as a standard-def DVD. The only catch is that you need some beefy CPU horsepower to play it back smoothly. The quality is still very very good and an enormous improvement over youtube and standard DVD.

3-6Mbps is probably reasonable for cable modem subscribers (and bored office workers), but some DSL modems may have trouble.

Long story short, I don’t think it’s a question of only capacity/bandwidth, but also of CPU (and software). We could be providing more HD video streams today at relatively low bandwidth/capacity levels, but the software and CPU power to play these back may not be all that widespread yet.

Their technology is not about video on demand but about broadcasting the *same* content simultaneously to a whole lot of people (where different recipients may suffer loss of different packets and could overload the *server* and its immediate environs - not the network at large - if they all asked for retransmissions). For transmission to a *single* recipient the technology always requires *more* bandwidth than traditional retransmission of lost packets would, and offers little in the way of jitter-avoidance as well (since the way you avoid jitter in either case is to delay the display on the recipient such that your buffering will ride out any likely transmission glitches).

- bill

Let’s end the blame game and just get video out there - 1 Mbps SD for the masses and multi-Mbps HD for the early adopters. If there is anything that concerns me, it’s how many ads will be needed to pay for 10x the bandwidth.

In the late ’90s we gave the telco’s a couple of hundred billion in tax breaks to take broadband everywhere. They took the money and did - nothing. So when they whine about net neutrality and how hard it is being a telco it is just business as usual.

Wes - yes, I bought the PR. I’m late to their game and don’t have their history, though the fact that they are 6 or 7 years old did give me pause. Nice demo though!

Random - you are absolutely correct on the economics of unpopular content. Thanks.

So it is just a matter of bandwidth to the home increasing enough to support higher quality, eh guys? OK, telcos, stop whining and start building bigger pipes!

Robin

IMHO your claim about storage cost is worth some clarification. It’s not about popular content, it’s about *unpopular* content. For popular content, amortize the cost of storage over the Opex of distribution, and cost of storage gets very SMALL. The place that declining cost-per-GB really brings elasticity is the long-tail. When the fixed cost of onlining an asset drops below the level of marginal distribution value (either tangible or intangible), then you encode it and put it on disk. Witness http://www.archive.org/details/movies.