Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Analog versus Digital TV

Some interesting info, from Mark Cuban, on bandwidth and the conversion from analog to digital. I was aware of the bandwidth savings moving from analog to digital, but not the numbers. It's pretty staggering. Would you give up CSPAN for 38 Mb/s Internet service? Cable & The Internet vs The FCC « blog maverick
Each analog channel takes up 38mbs of bandwidth. Thats right. CSPAN takes up more bandwidth than you have available to you for internet services. Crazy isnt it ?

The standard def digital version of the same channel takes up less than 3mbs. The typical HD version takes up about 8mbs or less. So, every time a channel is converted from analog to digital a MINIMUM of 28mbs is freed up.

Of course the bandwidth that is freed up can be used for any number of digital offerings, from more internet bandwidth (accomplished via channel bonding and Docsis 3.0), to more HD channels (which obviously is good for our HDNet), more video on demand and more.

2 comments:

Gordon F Snyder Jr said...

Great post Mike. The comments on Mark's post are very interesting!

Unknown said...

Thanks Gordon - Yeah really interesting post on Cuban's blog.

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