Lack of capacity is sad - bring on DSO! Having said that, I really hope Sky don't get the 4 muxes because they have enough of a monopoly already. With that amount of capacity they could offer a service to rival Freeview HD, which looks like it may only get one or two more muxes. At the very least it suffocates Freeview's potential to grow, which is already being suffocated by the lack of capacity on Optus D1. How fair is it that the government allocates 4 muxes to Sky in exchange for Prime, The Box, Sky Sport and Sky Movies, when TVNZ + Mediaworks + Maori TV have to share 3 in exchange for TV One, TV 2, TV 3, C4, and Maori TV!
You know it would take a very small percentage of the available DVB-T bandwidth to broadcast more EIT data with the show name only, no show content info. This simply means beefing up the amount of info already broadcast above say 1-2 events ahead.
There are existing units that work on the MPEG-4 broadcast, so to say there are no legacy units is a huge cop out. For example every single new PC running Window7 above the basic package has Media Centre with native MPEG4 capabilities, (even if the computers lack the grunt...). Sony's PlayTV is another one.
Out of interest, how many of the countries that have adopted MHEG-5 EPG's have provided no EIT support as well?
grolschie: Good idea regarding EIT broacast of program titles without descriptions. Even the next 10 events would be a huge bonus. :-)
Thanks, yeah I'd see this a huge workable compromise but I'd fully expect them to have yet another reason why it's not do able. Seriously it wouldn't take up that much more bandwidth honestly. This basically amounts to witholding the EPG data from a bunch of potential viewers (Win7 & PlayTV users etc), and in no way does this approach benefit the broadcasters.
Ironically they broadcast both on the sat service which is massively pressed for bandwidth (given the simulatneous TV1 broadcasts etc). The inpact on the terrestrial service of upping the EIT data by a bit, ideally a full 7 days worth of titles alone (no descriptions), wouldn't be that bad?
I was also surprised that bandwidth is the reason for not using EIT beyond the four next shows.
I'd have thought that compared to 1080i video (or even SD) that broadcasting any form of text would have been negligible. I guess this depends on how frequently the data is transmitted.
Is anyone using a TV-tuner able to say how much bandwidth EIT uses at the moment?
tristanb: Is anyone using a TV-tuner able to say how much bandwidth EIT uses at the moment?
I've posted a link to this, will go find it... Yeah here it is, basically it's sod all and bandwidth is being used as a cover...IMO.
Based on comments from freeviewshop forum:
Yeah it tends to go up and down with respect to how many events they show, typically about 5-10 in advance. It seems that the bandwidth usage remains constant 0.66% of the total available bandwidth.
In order to have a full EIT EPG with full descriptions Feeview would have to increase this to one and a bit percent like on the satellite service which uses a 1.3% of the total available bandwidth.
They could just send the name only and forget about the description of all the programs and increase the bandwidth usage to perhaps 0.8% and then PlayTV and lots of other things i.e. PC cards and other PVRs would all work great, or they could go the whole way and use a little over 1%
Are you subscribed to our RSS feed? You can download the latest headlines and summaries from our stories directly
to your computer or smartphone by using a feed reader.
Trusted
ID Verified
