My idea for a higher TV resolution

kinobestew123

kinobestew123

kinobestew123

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I'm going to talk in quite simplistic terms as i'm not massively clued up on how tv broadcasting works.

I've seen numerous articles around about tv broadcasters struggling to fit the increasing resolutions (1080p, 4k, etc) on the bandwidth available? I was thinking the other day, could they not resort to broadcasting SD through the airwaves and then develop a way of streaming the additional information required for HD and above via the internet?

More and more TVs are smart with internet links and the general public are comfortable with their TV being connected in this way. The TV would receive the additional data and, via a timestamp in both the SD airwaves transmission and HD internet transmission, align the two pieces of data appropriately.

Should the internet disconnect or not be strong enough, the TV can resort to the SD broadcast with no buffering.

Possible?

(In before lol april fools)
 
Yeah, something which carries a fairly high money subscription to have and additionally isn't available at many households.

There are many people who want a free tv service, especially the older generation, yet there is still a demand for higher resolutions for free. Rather than taking away existing bandwidth and designating it to HD channels, all channels could continue to be broadcast in SD and then the higher quality element provided via any internet connection (whether cable, adsl or some other future tech) which the household may have.

The added advantage is that resolutions can increase at the same rate as the internet yet still be backwards compatible for those with lesser TV's and internet services.

At the moment it's looking like there is going to be a change of existing channels into higher resolutions which will force people to upgrade to newer TV's or face losing the channels they currently watch.
 
Sorry...

n6vmh3.jpg
 
One day, people will look back and chuckle nostalgically at the notion of watching what a content provider wanted to beam into the air at any given time

In fact, I am right now
 
kinobestew123 said:
Yeah, something which carries a fairly high money subscription to have and additionally isn't available at many households.

There are many people who want a free tv service, especially the older generation, yet there is still a demand for higher resolutions for free. Rather than taking away existing bandwidth and designating it to HD channels, all channels could continue to be broadcast in SD and then the higher quality element provided via any internet connection (whether cable, adsl or some other future tech) which the household may have.

The added advantage is that resolutions can increase at the same rate as the internet yet still be backwards compatible for those with lesser TV's and internet services.

At the moment it's looking like there is going to be a change of existing channels into higher resolutions which will force people to upgrade to newer TV's or face losing the channels they currently watch.
Click to expand...

You point out that not everyone has cable and then proceed to shut out remote regions by moving the HD to a broadband VOD service.

You haven't thought this through very well have you?
 
The BT Vision / Youview service basically does this already. Freeview / SD over the airwaves and HD delivered over the FTTC connection.

OP, you are about 2 years too late to the party.
 
Freeview HD is already HD. There's already a million channels of utter mince, so I'm not worried about them reducing the number of channels and increasing the quality of what's left.
 
The biggest problem is tuners.

SD uses a different tuner from HD and HD a different one from 4K.

The only way to do 4K correctly would be to force it on everyone through legislation that broadcasters all have say 2 years to upgrade everyone to 4K and get rid of all the SD, HD and +1 channels.

The new 4K boxes would need to be capable of downscaling to 1080P, 1080i and 720P, they would also require multiple 4K tuners and a minimum of 500GB hard drive for recording (therefore no need for +1 channels).

The boxes would be hugely expensive currently and it's just not viable. Therefore I wish they would just make it mandatory 720P or 1080i and get rid of SD and +1 and tell everyone they need to upgrade or get no tv.

The infrastructure just cannot support all these channels, the best way would be to give everyone in the country fibre broadband and a sat dish with multiple LNB's so they could pick up more than 1 sat at a time.

If everyone in the country had a sat dish with 4 LNB's and fibre broadband, then there would be enough bandwidth to support SD, +1, HD, 4K and 8K all at the same time.

There's just no easy way to do it. It will need to be forced upon us like the digital switchover was.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
The biggest problem is tuners.

SD uses a different tuner from HD and HD a different one from 4K.

The only way to do 4K correctly would be to force it on everyone through legislation that broadcasters all have say 2 years to upgrade everyone to 4K and get rid of all the SD, HD and +1 channels.

The new 4K boxes would need to be capable of downscaling to 1080P, 1080i and 720P, they would also require multiple 4K tuners and a minimum of 500GB hard drive for recording (therefore no need for +1 channels).

The boxes would be hugely expensive currently and it's just not viable. Therefore I wish they would just make it mandatory 720P or 1080i and get rid of SD and +1 and tell everyone they need to upgrade or get no tv.

The infrastructure just cannot support all these channels, the best way would be to give everyone in the country fibre broadband and a sat dish with multiple LNB's so they could pick up more than 1 sat at a time.

If everyone in the country had a sat dish with 4 LNB's and fibre broadband, then there would be enough bandwidth to support SD, +1, HD, 4K and 8K all at the same time.

There's just no easy way to do it. It will need to be forced upon us like the digital switchover was.
Click to expand...

Except digiboxes were vastly cheaper than the sort of tech you're suggesting!
 
Spare a thought for those of us that can't watch a 20second youtube clip without buffering...

My internet is ****. I get 0.25mb....

Joys of living in the middle of nowhere.
 
Nice idea OP, very much like the extensions to the DTS spec for Master Audio etc? However seeing as most TVs can barely process current video standards properly I never want to see the tripe that would come out of a video processor receiving some data from the tuner and some data from the net and try to stitch it together properly in realtime!
 
There is much more bandwidth available on Satellite. Currently Freeview has more and better channels than Freesat but one way to allow more HD and 4K content would be to switch to Freesat. Although I think you are right and we will eventually move to Internet for TV. Infact it already exists with Youview and smart TVs.

Yes there are lots of rubbish channels that most people wouldn't miss but I guess they generate more money than having less HD channels. Although I would be happy for more money to be given from tax personally.
 
glen8 said:
50!!! you're having a laugh mate

It's quite a bit more than that :eek:
Click to expand...

I'm currently paying £41 without sports but including Broadband and line rental with free weekend calls.

Sky sports as an extra is £22/ month.

So for the lot would be £63/month. It's more than £50, but includes broadband and weekend calls and this is without any sort of offers, which are quite easy to get hold of, so it's not as bad as you're making out.
 
d_brennen said:
One day, people will look back and chuckle nostalgically at the notion of watching what a content provider wanted to beam into the air at any given time

In fact, I am right now
Click to expand...

Yes exactly.
I never watch broadcast television at all.

Very few people in my circle of friends watch broadcast TV and several of them don't even own a TV.

It's all Streaming and downloads for them.
 
There is plenty of bandwidth in terrestrial band to successfully carry HD TV at 1080p. However digital terrestrial is so problematic in UK because we let private company dictate standard and it jumped the gun and followed US model with mpeg2 stream in SD, instead of going one step further into the future. Mpeg2 SD is unreasonably heavy in terms of bandwidth, therefore with limited number of transponders some channels on heavily populated multiplexes need to lower compression by a lot to be able to deliver anything. And so the more channels paired with ITV2+1, the more it breaks into pixels. DVB-T2 update addressed this partially by adding much lighter mpeg4 to the mix for HD content, but you still have to maintain mpeg2 DVB-T streams, otherwise you would need everyone in the country to buy their terrestrial boxes and TV tuners again, to fully switch over to mpeg4. Before we even finished analogue to digital switchover. So with limited number of streams in h264/mpeg4, to save the bandwidth almost all HD broadcasts in UK are cheating by broadcasting interlaced HD, half of the lines at a time at lower bitrate, instead of proper progressive stream at higher bitrate. It also means, almost nothing you see on your screen from broadcasters is full representation of HD TV should look like and is capable of.

So, considering we haven't yet reached the HD stage fully, any discussion about 2k, 4k, gazillionk, whathave you is pointless, unless the next digital switchover is universally standardised. It will need better compression (h265 more likely next gen - h266?), it will need lower license fees, faster rollout of chipsets and happen across majority of the continent or globe in the same time frame. It's not going to happen for 10-20 years. But most of all, it will need revolution in broadcast world, which is still tape based and relies largely on XDCAM for content delivery, and that's mpeg2 at poxy 50Mbps bitrate.

Up until then things like 4k are for Apple TV to test and fail on. Internet 4k will never work in UK because we are still stuck in 20th century in internet tech. Most places in the country don't even have full speed ADSL2 yet. BT execs hold fibre internet cards very close to their chest, nobody knows when, if at all, all street cabinets that were bypassed in fibre rollout will be upgraded and no one ever got answer to the question of what criteria BT used when selecting cabinets to upgrade and bypass. There is just no way of forcing these people to tell you when you will get faster broadband and how fast will it actually be. Will you have FTTC, FTTH, when, how, with what throughput. There is no entity to query, no number to call to discuss future of your office or business in terms of data delivery, no office to visit to ask if the next place you invest in will have guaranteed upgrade to whatever comes after FTTC. Most ISPs in the country still want to run dial up like business models, where throughput is charged per Gb, traffic is shaped and words like unlimited have limitation. Look at the 4G mobile rollout. All contract carry data limits. You can get very little, very fast. That will never work for streaming of anything.
 
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