Is there an industry-wide minimum bit rate required to deliver decent quality HD TV? Iirc the Freeview folks have been talking about 8Mbit per HD channel, does that sound realistic?
What is the maximum "guaranteed" bit rate which BTwholesale will support? Even in BT's much-overhyped 21CN, afaict (according to the QoS service specification in SIN483 at www.sinet.bt.com), the maximum guaranteed bit rate is 2Mbit. Same maximum as in today's IPstream (pre-21CN) product, in fact (see why 21CN is over-hyped?).
HDTV? 2Mbit? It's a joke, just like most of BT, and 21CN in particular.
And that's just the technical aspect. There's the economics of content to think about as well.
If Panasonic are providing this service for "free" (ie included in the price of the set), they're not going to have much of a budget for "content", are they? And as we've been told many times by the MPAA, HD content is extremely valuable and extremely expensive (that's why Vista exists, to provide the MPAA with a trusted HD content delivery platform).
Summary: the bandwidth limit won't matter because there'll be no worthwhile content.
Other than that though, I do actually like the idea, so long as the user interface is easier to cope with than on my Panasonic DVD Recorder, which is actually worse than most PC software I've used!
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BT QoS ??? For HD ???
Is there an industry-wide minimum bit rate required to deliver decent quality HD TV? Iirc the Freeview folks have been talking about 8Mbit per HD channel, does that sound realistic?
What is the maximum "guaranteed" bit rate which BTwholesale will support? Even in BT's much-overhyped 21CN, afaict (according to the QoS service specification in SIN483 at www.sinet.bt.com), the maximum guaranteed bit rate is 2Mbit. Same maximum as in today's IPstream (pre-21CN) product, in fact (see why 21CN is over-hyped?).
HDTV? 2Mbit? It's a joke, just like most of BT, and 21CN in particular.
And that's just the technical aspect. There's the economics of content to think about as well.
If Panasonic are providing this service for "free" (ie included in the price of the set), they're not going to have much of a budget for "content", are they? And as we've been told many times by the MPAA, HD content is extremely valuable and extremely expensive (that's why Vista exists, to provide the MPAA with a trusted HD content delivery platform).
Summary: the bandwidth limit won't matter because there'll be no worthwhile content.
Other than that though, I do actually like the idea, so long as the user interface is easier to cope with than on my Panasonic DVD Recorder, which is actually worse than most PC software I've used!