Is there gonna be enough bandwidth for HD in the future?

[GS kid]

HD takes up alot more bandwidth than SD. CBS 58 has done a pretty good job of showing HD content on 1-1 while not hurting channels 1-2 & 1-3 as bad bandwidth wise as I would have thought. A year and a half ago I had mentioned to an engineer at one of the other stations that wasn't running DT yet about this to his surprise. He didn't know it could be done. But at some point, most if not all channels will be HD. Is CBS 58 gonna pay for another channel when 1-3 goes HD someday? What about others? I took electronic servicing classes about 7 years ago, but they glance through most subjects. They leave it up to you as to what field you wanna go into. Is there enough bandwidth to handle all channels if they were all to go HD? Either OTA, cable, or sat. Take your pick or all of them. Haven't read up on it. Was hoping those that follow this would have some info and insight. Could stations afford to pay the FCC for these new channels in order to have them all HD? At some point in the distant future, this will happen. Has there been any talk on what the heck they are gonna do?:confused:

[borghe]

I can't see either 41 or 63 going HD without first going to a full Class B license. It wouldn't make sense from a money stand point. If/when they went to a class b braodcasting license they would have to have their own channel.

[GS kid]

Thanks for the reply. You kinda answered the OTA question. I was also really wondering if there's enough bandwidth to support a few hundred channels that we have now in HD. I guess that's a cable/sat question since there won't be that many OTA channels of course. They have a rough road ahead on this issue. I should ask this same question on the AVS forum. Somebody will know I'm sure.

[borghe]

the future isn't written,k partially because there is new technology coming thaty hasn't even been thought of.

short answer, no, they will never "run out of room."

Long answer, yes, they may look like they will run out of room and maybe even come close to running out of room, but then new technology will come along that will again give them plenty of bandwidth.

and so goes technology.

[summerfun]

Compression is the answer. As borghe said, we will always improve the technology. The compression has come light years from what we used to have; I can only imagine what will be next.

We will have entire movies beamed through in seconds, downloaded directly to your TV for viewing at your pleasure. Entire libraries of files stored on a single disk. It's not as far off as you may think.

I have 1 GB of pictures stored on a little plastic disc in my camera, who would have thought that was possible. It was only a few short years ago I was excited to store 10MB on my first hard drive.

[GS kid]

I was a programmer back in the 80's. Got burnt-out doing banking systems for Unisys. Booooring! I've kinda left programming behind and have been really into hardware the last 14 years. I'm no math professor from MIT or Caltech. I've never programmed compression algorithms, nor read deeply into the technology. Compression is basiclly mathematical shorthand to make files or data packets smaller in size for storage and transmission. I'm always amazed at how they can still come up with new and better compression algorithms. There has got to be a finite amount of ways you can shorthand represent computer data. How do they do it?!?!?:bow:

You are right about compression. I'm sure that will help alot. Never really fully took that into account. I think HDTV uses MPEG-2 if I'm not mistaken. MPEG-4 seems to be the hot, new (new to mainstream users anyways, it's been around a bit) compression method. I should read up on it so as to see it's advantages over the others. I don't know if it's viable for HDTV or not. We have dedicated MPEG-2 chips in our decoders, so a simple MPEG-4 algorithm upgrade is kinda out of the question. It's an interesting and fun time we live in!