HD video vs the internet
For a long time, streaming video on the internet meant tiny, postage-stamp-sized images and a lot of buffering … buffering … buffering …. More recently, better connections, cheaper bandwidth, and improved compression technology have greatly improved things, as you can see on YouTube, the BBC’s streaming iPlayer, and other similar sites. But if you’ve tried to watch some of these clips full-screen on a big monitor, you’ll know that there are still some shortcomings, particularly when there’s a lot of action in the video.
Addressing this, video-sharing site Dailymotion has announced that, from now on, they’re going to be encoding everything in high definition where possible — i.e., where the source is high definition. They’re even going to go back and re-encode older stuff. By HD, they mean 720p, so it’s not ‘full’ HD, but it’s still pretty good, and should look much better on high-resolution screens. You can browse Dailymotion’s HD content on a dedicated page.
As they point out, however, you’ll need more bandwidth and processing power to watch these videos than for the regular content. So keep an eye on things, and don’t come crying to me when your ISP boots you off or charges extra for all the extra bits!
It’s not just individuals on capped tariffs who are going to be hit by this, though: ISPs are also suffering from the increased bandwidth demands. According to one analysis, the BBC iPlayer alone increased ISP bandwidth costs by two hundred percent.
Some people have been suggesting that the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle was already irrelevant, and that downloadable movies might turn out to be the real winner in the high definition format wars. It’s still the case that a lorry full of Blu-Ray discs is capable of moving a lot more data a lot more quickly than the internet can manage it, so the success of downloadable HD video would seem to depend on whether the infrastructure can keep pace. Plus, it looks like Blu-Ray is still the clear winner over other distribution methods in terms of video quality. Personally, my bet would be on Blu-Ray for the moment.
Blog posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 1:46 pm under Televisions. Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
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