Hello; On Apr 1, 2006, at 3:54 PM, Simon Lockhart wrote:
On Sat Apr 01, 2006 at 01:26:51PM -0600, Frank Bulk wrote:
The majority of U.S.-based IP TV deployments are not using MPEG-4
Agreed. However, I'd say that any IPTV provider currently using MPEG2 would be planning a migration to MPEG4/H.264 - half the bandwidth means double the channels.
Also, I think that the majority of IP TV deployments right now are not in the US.
in fact, you would be hard-pressed to find an MPEG-4 capable STB working with middleware.
I disagree. There are several MPEG4 capable STB available now, and they all have support of middleware vendors.
In the last IPTV trade show I went to (TVoDSL in Paris in January), I don't recall a single MPEG STB or IPTV system vendor who wasn't either showing or promising H.264 support.
SD MPEG-2 runs around ~4 Mbps today and HD MPEG-2 is ~19 Mbps. With ADSL2+ you can get up to 24 Mbps per home on very short loops, but if you look at the loop length/rate graphs, you'll see that even with VDSL2 only the very short loops will have sufficient capacity for multiple HD streams. FTTP/H is inevitable.
Anyone looking to do HD will be looking at H.264, and looking to bring the bandwidth requirement down to 8-10Mbps. That is certainly more practical with ADSL2+ deployments (unless you want more than one STB per DSL).
Which you would in the US, but maybe not everywhere (yet).
Simon (Currently working on an H.264 IPTV deployment) --
Regards Marshall
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