VIA SATELLITE: Some broadcasters, especially in the cable sector, have said that transitioning from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 is costly. What are the issues that need to be solved in order to make MPEG-4 a reality for cable broadcasters?
HOBBS: Transitioning from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 affects programmers and broadcast networks differently. For programmers, whose target audience is U.S. cable headend sets that can only handle MPEG-2 transmissions, the transition can be expensive. From a technology perspective, the switch to MPEG-4 saves the programmers money, but it means that a more expensive receiver device at the headend will need to transcode that video from MPEG-4 back to MPEG-2 so that the cable operators can use it. If they are targeting a telecom headend and they are already using MPEG-4, they won’t have that same issue.
For broadcast networks, the transition problems are a little easier to solve. Because of all the local content that has to be inserted into the stream and then re-encoded at the station level, it is a little bit easier because they always decode back to an uncompressed signal anyway. So from their perspective, they simply needed a new receiver to be sent out. Consistency of signal quality is the biggest concern for broadcast networks as well as maintaining what they consider to be true broadcast quality so that the consumer at home would not be able to discern any difference whatsoever in the video quality before the transition to MPEG-4, as opposed to after
VIA SATELLITE: Will the transition be easier for telecoms and programmers?
HOBBS: For the telecoms, issues over what bit rate is coming over satellite and whether that bit rate can be used by the telecom become a concern. They would have to figure out what kind of trans-rating has to be done to lower the bit rate if necessary. Programmers are having to weigh the financial savings from potentially using less transponder capacity for the same amount of data by going to MPEG-4 versus the higher cost of the headend for the receiving equipment.
VIA SATELLITE: What developments will we see from Tandberg in terms of HD content delivery methods?
HOBBS: In October, we released a new cable HD program transcoder that enables programmers to harness bandwidth efficiencies of MPEG-4 AVC HD and DVB-S2 satellite distribution, the RX8250. PEG-4 AVC HD content can be cost-effectively converted into high quality MPEG-2 HD streams at the cable head end. It is an HD distribution solution which enables content providers to carry six to eight MPEG-4 AVC HDTV channels on a satellite transponder. This represents a doubling in the number of channels to be carried per transponder compared to some of the top-end MPEG-2/DVB-S HD satellite distribution solutions out there. The RX8250 also overcomes the legacy barrier to MPEG-4 AVC HD content for operators whose cable networks have a large installed base of MPEG-2 HDTV set-top boxes by enabling efficient transcoding of MPEG-4 AVC/DVB-S2 distributed content into high quality MPEG-2 HD.
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