The experiment didn't need the full power of a station to prove though. I'm not really sure that this is as much innovation as you imply. Channels have been splitting their bandwidth for years. In fact, Congress wasn't really happy with the network's decision to fraction the signal as the intent was a single full bandwidth signal. We've also already seen what the switch from MPEG2 to MPEG4 can do for allowing more channels via cable boxes.
It's also a case of equipment available today is much more robust compared to the cable TV. I was testing the MPEG4 abilities of some of these earlier boxes. Encoding based on the white papers provided for the chips, we found these were not very accurate and required a lot of tweaking to get to work. The chips in today's TVs are much better, so there's a lot more that can be gotten away with.
if this hadn’t been performed on a real, live, over the air signal with a real, live, audience providing feedback to the station, we (and my competition, other broadcast brethren) wouldn’t be talking about this now.
fyi - AVC and HEVC decoders are, sadly, far more fickle than they should be, in 2024. we would like to believe they all implement a working HRD buffer model, read and obey stuff we put into the SEI and VUI NAL units, as well as properly support basic functions like slices and layers (such as non-ref P frames for 60P refinement of a 30p sequence), and etc.
heck, based on current feedback and testing, the least common denominator for maximum reference frames in AVC is four, and HEVC is five. sad, but better than mpeg2.
The experiment didn't need the full power of a station to prove though. I'm not really sure that this is as much innovation as you imply. Channels have been splitting their bandwidth for years. In fact, Congress wasn't really happy with the network's decision to fraction the signal as the intent was a single full bandwidth signal. We've also already seen what the switch from MPEG2 to MPEG4 can do for allowing more channels via cable boxes.
It's also a case of equipment available today is much more robust compared to the cable TV. I was testing the MPEG4 abilities of some of these earlier boxes. Encoding based on the white papers provided for the chips, we found these were not very accurate and required a lot of tweaking to get to work. The chips in today's TVs are much better, so there's a lot more that can be gotten away with.
if this hadn’t been performed on a real, live, over the air signal with a real, live, audience providing feedback to the station, we (and my competition, other broadcast brethren) wouldn’t be talking about this now.
fyi - AVC and HEVC decoders are, sadly, far more fickle than they should be, in 2024. we would like to believe they all implement a working HRD buffer model, read and obey stuff we put into the SEI and VUI NAL units, as well as properly support basic functions like slices and layers (such as non-ref P frames for 60P refinement of a 30p sequence), and etc.
heck, based on current feedback and testing, the least common denominator for maximum reference frames in AVC is four, and HEVC is five. sad, but better than mpeg2.