Cable operators, already struggling to find the bandwidth to compete effectively with satellite’s HD offerings, also face more high-definition competition from such Internet-download services as Vudu, which is ramping up its HDTV offerings and touting its ability to provide higher-quality content.
Just this month, the service launched HDX, a new format that allows its users to download HD content in 1080p at 24 frames per second, a format with greater resolution than the 720p or 1080i formats typically used by broadcasters and cable channels.
“HDX is a new benchmark for on-demand video quality,” said Vudu chief technology officer Prasanna Ganesan. “We are comfortable at saying HDX is better than everything else available in the market except Blu-ray [which also uses 1080p at 24 frames per second, but is encoded at much higher bit rates.] HDX does not suffer from any of the artifacts that you will see on cable or satellite broadcasts.”
Vudu’s move comes as satellite-TV providers Dish Network and DirecTV are setting plans to launch content in the higher-quality 1080p format. If such resolution catches on with viewers, cable providers could feel pressure to free up the need bandwidth to offer content at 1080p.
Vudu also illustrates how Internet download services are becoming increasing competitive with cable’s VOD offering.
Vudu launched a video-download service a little over a year ago that now has over 10,000 titles, mostly in standard definition. Earlier this year, it added HDTV content by allowing users with a 4 Megabits-per-second connection to instantly access streaming HD movies in 1080p.
The new HDX format is an effort to offer the highest possible video quality to consumers with high end home theater systems and large HDTVs, Ganesan said.
The MPEG-4 high definition content in 1080p at 24 frames per second is encoded at an average of 9 to 10 Mbps, more than twice the 4 Mbps rate Vudu uses for the streaming HD moves. VUDU also encodes content at variable bit rates and uses a variety of other techniques to reduce artifacts and boost video quality.
“The variable-bit-rate encoding is crucial to achieving the kind of quality in HDX that you won’t see in broadcast,” he said, with action sequences encoded at much higher bit rates. “We are able to put the bits in places that need it and still keep the file sizes manageable by reducing them in other places that don’t need it.”
The company’s proprietary TruFilm technology, which is the basis of the HDX format, also virtually eliminates artifacts caused by film grain or dark areas of the picture. In addition, it cuts out the artifacts and jagged lines between subtle color gradients that are sometimes seen on LCD and plasma televisions.
The increased quality does come with a price. Unlike the streaming HD films, which Vudu launched earlier this year, users must download the movie prior to viewing it, a process that often takes as long as watching the movie, Ganesan said.
At launch in early October, Vudu offered about 65 titles in the HDX format but this catalog is rapidly increasing.
“We have agreements with all the major studios to offer their content in HD so all the new releases are coming out in HD,” Ganesan said.
Ganesan also dismisses worries that bandwidth caps on broadband usage could hurt the proliferation of HD content online.
“The Comcast cap allows you to download up to 40 HDX movies a month and 200 standard-def movies before you run afoul with the cap,” he said. “So we don’t think it will be an issue for people offering premium content for sale.”
