Starz Entertainment has
been making some pretty
big moves of late, the most recent of which involves Motorola. The latter firm has announced that it will be "implementing a four-channel, high-definition MPEG-4/AVC encoding system" for Starz, which it will use to migrate away from its current MPEG-2 installations. It's reported that the change will enable Starz to "expand its HD offerings for subscribers," and as predicted, the system is being first implemented for the outfit's existing HD channels: Starz HD, Starz Kids and Family HD, Starz Edge HD and Starz Comedy HD. Oh, and if you were wondering, the
recently unveiled Encore HD will be launched "concurrent with this migration."
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
drx @ Jun 5th 2008 8:33AM
Glad to see Starz taking such initatives. Now if Verizon would just get off it's ass and deploy those new HD channels they've been promising since last November.
brad @ Jun 5th 2008 11:29AM
So... this is just for satellite Direct TV type folk.
J.Goodwin @ Jun 5th 2008 11:39AM
It affects everyone though. I don't know if FIOS was pushing MPEG2 streams down the pipes or MPEG4, but if they were doing the latter, then they were transcoding, so the quality should improve in either case, and most likely you'll also have a bitrate reduction because when you're transcoding that always takes more bits than when you're coding from a high quality source than from another well compressed source.