MPEG and Bitrates

Among the gazillions of demos at the Cable Show next week will be one in the Motorola booth for the TV pixel geeks. For those who fondly compare the video outputs of different compression schemes, Motorola will have displays up showing video quality comparisons of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 videos at various bitrates. The purpose is [...]

Motorola Tuning Resolver Flies through CableLabs Interop

I’ve gotten more than few friendly nudges lately for an update on the switched digital video (SDV) tuning resolver. The Motorola device is now officially called the MTR700 and it just came through a CableLabs interop with flying colors. Next the product will be submitted to CableLabs’ Cert Wave 60, and then it will be [...]

Latest Internet Video Stats – ISP Sites in the Top Ten

ComScore has new Internet video stats for the month of February. Online video viewing was up 66% over the same time last year, adding up to a monthly total of 10.1 billion videos screened on the Web. Interestingly, both Time Warner sites (excluding AOL) and Comcast’s Fancast portal scored in ComScore’s top-ten list. Fancast was [...]

New Motorola Mobile TV DH02

Taking a break for the moment from the highly technical posts, here’s some news that was somewhat obscured by yesterday’s corporate announcement that Motorola will split into two parts. (There, I’ve said it. No, I don’t have any more information. No, I can’t speculate on how the split will occur.) In [...]

Little-Known Updates on the DTV Transition

The lunchtime speaker at last week’s Policy Symposium was Meredith Baker, acting administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). And although the session didn’t have much to do with the rest of the conference, Ms. Baker was chock full of updates on the federal DTV converter box coupon program.
First, the [...]

Madness in March

It’s that time of year again. CBS is once again planning to stream March Madness games online for free throughout the NCAA tournament. In 2006, the first year CBS offered March Madness On Demand at no cost, the CBS.com site set a record for simultaneous online video streams at 268,000. In 2008 [...]

Things That Go Up

Both US mobile broadband usage and TV viewing on the Internet have soared. In two entirely different articles today I read that:

Mobile broadband usage has gone up 154% in a year, and
NBC.com measured more than half a billion video streams on the Web in virtually the same time span.

This begs the [...]

The Digital TV Transition: One Year to Go

This is my official, one-year-until-the-digital-TV transition post. Consider it part primer, part Motorola perspective.
Why are we having a digital TV transition?
The original impetus behind moving to all-digital television was a regulatory push to reclaim broadcast channels for public/civic use. However, with the rapid growth of HDTV, on-demand television and streaming video on the [...]

Verizon’s Path to All-Digital Includes Motorola DCT700s

As part of the deal for its CableCARD waiver last year, Verizon promised to convert to all-digital video signals by the time of the official analog shut-off in 2009. To do that, the operator is looking at providing free digital set-tops to its analog holdovers, and today I confirmed those set-tops will be Motorola [...]

The Future of TV - A Vision from 15 Years Ago

EngadgetHD dug up a post recently from Rex Sorgatz on the first issue of Wired magazine. It’s a fantastic archeological dig, so if you have time, do read the whole piece.

The item I found most interesting was the reference to a feature article by Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte (yes, the Negroponte [...]