Wireless Industry Study Finds TV Stations Can Share Channels

A test conducted by two Los Angeles TV stations proved stations can successfully share the same digital channel by combining their digital video streams without any disruption in broadcast quality.

The LA broadcast engineers found that using newer compression technologies allowed them to successfully air more streams in the same channel space.

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My TV signal just got a boost recently after looking like some noisy artifacted JPEG's. Now back to the crap streams.

Are people honestly asking for more channels?

There's already like 300 channels at everyone's house, but then you check their favorites and they watch like four channels.

The rest are televangelists, crap in Vietnamese or Spanish, dumb reality shows, and such with 50% commercials.

Give people faster internet and ala-cart shopping abilities so they can just pick the few channels they actually want.

I have an antenna for HD reception for over the air signals. Not sure if it is similar technology but CBS for example has 3.1 through say 3.4 where the different versions for each channel have different programming. For example 3.2 may be alternate show, 3.3 is just weather. Although I don't really use the extra programming I think it is cool that it is there.

Newer compression on the left...

Not sure what they mean by broadcast quality? Atsc is 20mbps per RF channel. You can put more virtual channels, but you drop the bitrate for each. 10mbps each probably isn't too bad, but everybody wants their own subchannels and its going to get nasty quick. There's a channel around me that has I think 12 subchannels with video and another 8 audio only. It works, but it's painful to watch.

Of course, this is coming from the industry that thinks 13kbps is too much for voice, so they use 8k

Ducman69 said:

Are people honestly asking for more channels?

There's already like 300 channels at everyone's house, but then you check their favorites and they watch like four channels.

The rest are televangelists, crap in Vietnamese or Spanish, dumb reality shows, and such with 50% commercials.

Give people faster internet and ala-cart shopping abilities so they can just pick the few channels they actually want.

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I think the idea is more that same of the spectrum could possibly be re-purposed for something else

mesasone said:

I think the idea is more that same of the spectrum could possibly be re-purposed for something else

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That was kind of my thought also. They pushed everything off of analog to free up that part of the spectrum for other uses. Now if you can take everything in the digital tv range and compress it down to half of what it was given for the same stations then they could take that and use that for other stuff also.

With all the new things coming out that require more spectrum space for different things I could see them needing to try to free up even more than what they have before.