大象传媒

So, explain to me again why we're all going to be receiving superhighdef3D telly pictures on our cell phones?

=oD

I really can't see mobile TV taking off in a huge way. Other than news ect.

I have tried to watch movies and TV shows on my ipod video and it just doesn't work on a screen so small.

I really don't understand why the internet is so underused in content delivery. The file sharers have shown that it is a more than viable option especially when using good compression like xvid.

Whilst at the Thames Festival I saw the mass of furry gun mics on a lattice on the roof of city hall, I wondered what they were for - now I know!

Can't imagine the average production carting that many microphones around for 22.2 surround.

I think the parallels with the development of our current HD solution are fairly obvious - the name Super Hi-Vision even echoes the old Japanese analogue HDTV service (developed in the late 80's) Hi-Vision.

I remember seeing this going on a analogue HD TV (sourced from a HD laserdisc player) thinking WOW!

Nearly 20 years later and the promise of HD TV is finally being delivered.

Where is the bandwidth for Super Hi-Vision going to come from? Freeview currently goes to pot when it rains because there is not enough bandwidth for adequate error correction. Cramming more signal into the broadcast will just make things worse.

A year ago and I would have said using using mobie phones was a non-starter, for both recording and reciving. But I was on a train the other day and saw a girl watching Breakfast Tv on freeview on a what looked like at 3 and a 1/2 inch or 4 inch widescreen player. As we left the train I asked her and she said it was live, not a podcast. Did she use it often. "Oh, all the time. They watch 'Doctors' at work on it".

Ok, it was not a mobile phone she was using, but how long before they put a freeview reciver in a moblie phone. Look at the i-phone and i-player screens. The picture looks good and all you have to do is add freeview.

So I think it is starting to happen. Come to thing I would watch F1 on any size screen, if that's all I had to hand, however boring it can get! So its just a matter of what would make you use it.

I am a cameraman working on Broadcast and Corporates stuff (from News to Promos), whilst its true its done the way you say it is doesn't mean it should.

Yes you can film with a Z1 and get OK pictures but there not the same as filming on Digi Beta or even a DSR, and how many times have we watched a press conference (on any 24hr news channel) and not been able to hear what's being said. Now, tell me what are the advantages of a One Man Crew? The fact of the matter is with the right tools and the right people we can make magic, without those it becomes visual wallpaper and you can't even wrap your chips in it.

Its down to money and the lack of a public response - people don't like the quality of what goes out but they can't be bothered to complain.

Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Spend, spend, spend.

I watch about 5 hrs of TV a week; documentaries mainly plus the better comedy.
If I could continue doing that on an * ordianary * TV then I`d happily do so. (Tho iPlayer means I can watch when convenient to me.)
But if this relentless innovation is forced upon us, as happens with new operating systems etc and digital TV, then I might just drop out of this technology arms race.

In a domestic situation, Hi-Vision is so out of whack with what consumers need and want (not always the same thing, remember). 1080p is already a waste compared to 720p (i.e. you can't discern the difference all those extra pixels are making) with a screen smaller than about 42" in the average UK living room, what need therefore for a even more bandwidth-hungry format?


I don't particularly care what NHK and RAI do with their money, but for obvious reasons I am concerned what the 大象传媒 thinks it should be doing mucking about with what should probably just be a university research project.

What the manufacturers, regulators and governments should be focussing on is developing modular, extensible technology to rid us of the curse of dead-end, inefficient codecs as used on most current digital platforms. Instead we get locked into a 15 year-old technology (DVB-T, DAB) that inevitably trades questionable quantity for quality and will cost us (and the environment) dear to replace in the next decade when we all want/are forced to have HD.

A bit more thought, a long-term view and some regulatory pressure and I'm sure we could have a proper platform that could give us true interactivity, efficient use of spectrum and a minimum quality standard that at the very least matches what was possible with analogue PAL. Sadly, DVB-T is miles from this, and the folly of a 20ft screen and 24 speakers shows that us poor consumers might be waiting a long time.

Wow juuxjuux, you have absolutely hit the nail on the head. 720p is more than adequte form the vast majority of Uk households and will always be so until we start building bigger living rooms!

Freeview sadly, sucks somewhat and the future will never be HD using an aerial hence the move to plug Freesat to justify 大象传媒's exepensive (and currently indadequate) HD channel.

By all means, look to the future but this is all a bit too 'Tomorrow's World' for me :-)

juuxjuux is right - this talk of more and more resolution is just nonsense, you just won't be able to see the difference on a livingroom-sized screen, and while there will always be a market for people who want to turn their livingrooms into mini cinemas, they are always going to be in the minority.

This is very similar to digital still camera manufacturers and ever-increasing megapixel sensors - there are many more issues with image quality that aren't to do with resolution which are being completely overlooked, mainly because people like things simple and like a simple way of quantifying quality. Because they're simple.

juuxjuux is more or less right. It also makes me angry that people in the bbc are mucking about with future formats when their own current service 大象传媒 HD has a long way to go - it's still only 5hrs a day weekdays. It's still using DVB-S on satellite. It's still using fairly unimpressive codecs that are far surpassed by sky's tandberg ones. Please right some better codecs. The picture quality on 大象传媒 HD is too poor for how much bandwidth it uses.

out of all the home TV systems I have seen I have yet to find an HD set worth the money, they all look very pixelated.

I have what most would consider a home cinema system which consists of a projector giving a screen size of 120" and a digital 5.1 surround sound system, which is more than adequate for my needs, also the 320x240 pixel screen of my nokia N95 8GB is great for watching stuff on the bus/train or at work (the nokia video converter on the PC is rubbish there are better programs available)

I don't think the average television viewer is demanding ever higher definition of sound and picture. I think the main demand is better quality programming.

It's all very well having 100 channels of super high definition, 22.2 surround sound television, but if there's nothing to watch it's a waste of time.

Super Hi-Def with 22.2 sound channels sounds like a replacement for IMAX (who, in turn, are basically an updated version of the old black-and-white newsreels), and IMAX-quality may then become cheap enough and compact enough to migrate to standard cinema. Cinema-style widescreen is, in turn, migrating into the home. It's a natural progression.

I do agree with the whole quality of the material rather than quality of the definition argument. By becoming very selective about what I am willing to watch, I have discovered that you can't currently have it both ways. When emphasis is placed on quality of material, quality of medium is often sacrificed. The reverse is also true. There is no obvious reason why that should be true, other than time and money budgets being finite, although I suspect there may be two schools of thought in production that are highly antagonistic towards each other and refuse all compromise.

For pixellation, blame the codecs. MPEG-2 is often over-compressed in order to fit more channels onto limited bandwidth, and higher-quality codecs (the 大象传媒's Dirac springs to mind) won't be remotely in the picture, so to speak, for a long time. The hardware won't be here for some time, and then the legacy systems will prevent adoption on any meaningful scale for 5-10 years after.