Overcoming the Bit-Rate Barrier: Decoder Techniques for Delivering High-Quality Video over Low-Bandwidth Networks

Pay TV digital broadcasters worldwide are embracing the new MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC) video codec. Until now, a significant investment was required in order to expand network capacity. This fiscal barrier limited the number MPEG-2 technology-based HDTV channels a broadcaster could economically offer. This is driving the need to provide additional channels of premium content in order to retain current customers and attract new subscribers. Clearly, high-definition programming is emerging as a powerful weapon in the fight for the top revenue-generation subscribers, with MPEG-4 AVC a key enabling technology in the industry transition to mainstream HDTV. Similarly, the two competing next-generation video disk formats in the DVD industry—HD-DVD and BluRay—have also adopted AVC along with alternative low bit-rate codecs in order to fit movie titles in an HDTV format into single disks.