November 27, 2007

C4HD

Rumours over at Cable Forum that Virgin Media won't be carrying the forthcoming C4HD channel any time soon but we may get some HD content via VoD. Disappointing - surely carrying a second HD channel isn't going to choke that much bandwidth?

Having said that, it may not be too long a wait...here's an interesting post from Sirius on Digital Spy. What he's saying is that the new Scientific Atlanta equipment being purchased by VM for its headends will be able to take any HD feeds from FreeSat, regardless of whether they're MPeg2 or (more likely) MPeg4, and carry them on Virgin. He also points out that a single analogue channel from the legacy network being dropped will free up enough capacity for three HD channels, so bandwidth ain't a reason to hold back. (It's been suggested on Cable Forum by the engineers who post there that VM intend to close the analogue network down Q1 2008, though I've seen nothing definite on that from VM)

No comments: