Negative. They have plenty of space. Every cable company has been steadily reducing the number of analog channels for many years. Each one is enough space for 2 full rate stations (which no one willingly dedicates to a single station -- they're more or less required to for broadcast stations.) TWC has been shown to place 6+ HD stations on one channel. Sometimes that means there isn't enough bandwidth for realtime delivery.
What *is* eating the overwelming majority of space is all the on-demand, iControl(tm) interactive crap they've been heavily pushing for several years. Across the full RF spectrum -- all 134 carriers -- they have room for 400-1000 stations/channels depending on how much bandwidth is allocated; for the 400 number that's just over 12Mbps for every channel which is way more than most channels need.
However, I do, reluctantly, see SDV as a necessary evil. It's the difference between transmitting *everything* and transmitting what's necessary. If noone is watching Lifetime, there's no need to be filling space with it. Look at it like IP multicast; the switch will not put traffic on the wire if nothing on that port has asked for it.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
cramer @ Oct 18th 2008 3:09AM
Negative. They have plenty of space. Every cable company has been steadily reducing the number of analog channels for many years. Each one is enough space for 2 full rate stations (which no one willingly dedicates to a single station -- they're more or less required to for broadcast stations.) TWC has been shown to place 6+ HD stations on one channel. Sometimes that means there isn't enough bandwidth for realtime delivery.
What *is* eating the overwelming majority of space is all the on-demand, iControl(tm) interactive crap they've been heavily pushing for several years. Across the full RF spectrum -- all 134 carriers -- they have room for 400-1000 stations/channels depending on how much bandwidth is allocated; for the 400 number that's just over 12Mbps for every channel which is way more than most channels need.
However, I do, reluctantly, see SDV as a necessary evil. It's the difference between transmitting *everything* and transmitting what's necessary. If noone is watching Lifetime, there's no need to be filling space with it. Look at it like IP multicast; the switch will not put traffic on the wire if nothing on that port has asked for it.