Blue-laser players see price drop, market acceptance

[shaithis]

We already have terrestrial HD........at least if you live close to the transmitter at Crystal Palace and have HD DVB hardware.

Its being trialled and hopefully should be with us soon.

[Biscuit]

The thing is, the longer they hold on with analogue TV the more bullcrap channels appear. HD DVB takes a lot more bandwidth than regular DVB and the only way it can appear around the country is if analogue is switched off. The longer they leave it the more crappy channels & mobile phone companies try to get a hold on the soon to be available bandwidth. Personally i think we will end up with 1 or 2 HD terrestrial channels at the most. Obviously i hope for more but until all the old fogeys buy themselfs freeview sets we are stuck at 576i

EDIT - one other thing worth mentioning; did you know HD was around in the 80s? they trialed it in some small town (i forget where) but it used CRT technology so as u can imagine the TVs where mahooosive. There where 3 formats for HD back then but none of them succceeded in going mainstream mainly because of bandwidth allowences.

[LazyGit]

In response to my previous post some of you have said that streaming will not be readily accepted by users and that the next level of HD requires too much bandwidth.

I'm talking about streaming happening in 5-10 years time, people area already using On-Demand without knowing what it means, if they can get all media that way they will love it. Bandwidth? You talk about it as if it's much more feasible to put all that data on a piece of plastic rather than throw it through the air. Not only is Wi-Fi much more able to transmit all the media we need but it's much much cheaper for distributors to use compared to paying money to companies to stamp out incredibly complex media formats.

[Biscuit]

I didnt say people will not widely accept it i was just saying that media on a hard format wont be made redundant.
Bandwidth is still limited through the air, if two things transmit at the same frequency then you just get a scrambled mess. Thus making bandwidth very expensive. Do some research find out how much it cost to get radio bandwidth, i promise you disks are a lot cheaper.
When i was talking about streaming the ultra hd i was talking about the stream from a disk, there isnt enough bitrate for it to tranfer from a regular dvd or hddvd (im pretty sure of this) so the likely hood of that traveling through a copper cable is very unlikely.
Wifi is hardly a long range concept though and i cant see that being used on large scale.

[shaithis]

Real VOD is many many years away, especially for HD content.

It would basically require a minimum of a 100mb UN-CONTENDED connection to every home...

We are so far away from that, it isn't even worth thinking about. In fact I would say 10 years is being overly optimistic due to the vast work that would need to be done to the entire UKs communication infrastructure. Work no one will want to fit the bill for.

[Jonny M]

In fact I would say 10 years is being overly optimistic due to the vast work that would need to be done to the entire UKs communication infrastructure. Work no one will want to fit the bill for.

You haven't heard about 21CN then.

http://www.btplc.com/21CN/

[shaithis]

Thanks for that. (and no, I hadn't heard of that and TBH, I'm stunned that BT are laying out that kind of cash....)

You still have many other hurdles to overcome though.....100mb PER home of dedicated bandwidth is just not going to happen, somewhere upstream its going to hit a rather large bottleneck and those bottlenecks will hit others.

Contention ratios will exist even under that 21CN project by the looks of things and you can't have true HD VOD until all contention is gone, something I can never see happening due to the sheer size of the scaling we are talking about. You would need to have the technology out-pace you, which could mean several generations of technology before its viable.