View Single Post
Old 16th May 2013, 22:56   #163  |  Link
kieranrk
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: London, United Kingdom
Posts: 707
Quote:
Originally Posted by benwaggoner View Post
For OTA, broadcasting, sure. Huge decoder switching costs, which is why most of that is MPEG-2. South Korea has already done two rounds of OTA HEVC 4K already, though.

I think OTA is a pretty small and shrinking slice of viewership, though.

That is an argument you'd have to actually make. Until everyone in a household can reliably get 15 Mbps streams simultaneously, the web has serious bandwidth restrictions.
Improved compression isn't holding back any major product developments that will cause a significant revenue stream for web video (though perhaps so for mobile) - it's why a lot of places are happy sending the junk from Elemental "GPU" encoders after all. Apart from being an incremental improvement, what new revenue streams will HEVC bring in? H.264 brought in HD video on the web but in my opinion HEVC brings no new products to the table. I guess there's a possibility for 4K but I would imagine Hollywood would want to charge a premium for that and not give it away to Netflix. It's the same with MPEG-DASH; deployment is sluggish since the benefits don't appear to be financially worthwhile.

In most of the world STBs last for ~10 years or so; Korea is the special case in that there is a short upgrade period. All the more so when people have a lot of PVR'd recordings that can't be easily moved between STB (Device specific DRM).

Quote:
Citation? That's not what I'm hearing for living-room devices. Mobile doesn't seem to have nearly as much taste for 10-bit, certainly.
I think it's public knowledge that there's a row going on about this in DVB, which will in effect set the global agenda for living room devices.

Quote:
Huge switching costs there, which is why they're mostly still getting MPEG-2 anyway. The bandwidth savings of MPEG-2 -> HEVC could make STB replacement cost-effective, however.

But video decoder license fees are a small fraction of a STB's cost, and are a lot higher and uncapped for MPEG-2 anyway. If license fees were a big deal, people would have stopped shipping MPEG-2 decode a long time ago (note that it's not in Win8 by default now). VC-1 and H.264 were both much, much cheaper at the time.
Codec licensing fees are still not insignificant and are the basis of a lot of the audio codec STB wars (Dolby/DTS/AAC). Even on modern platforms there is still a lot of legacy MPEG-2. It's different in Win8 because end-users purchase the product, whereas STBs are given away for free and so a few dollars saved across millions of devices is worth saving, nobody is going to notice a few extra dollars on Win8 RRP.

Last edited by kieranrk; 16th May 2013 at 23:01.
kieranrk is offline   Reply With Quote