I was playing around with comcast On Demand at a friends house, and actually it is quite impressive, any chance of directv adding this feature with the new satellies going up?
I've heard that they have plans for this but will they be offered in the future is up in the air right now. Here are the plans I've heard to start off.
Firstly these new satellites can handle both video and data (internet).
I've heard that they will offer it this way if they offer it at all.
Firstly for customers to get on Demand access they will need their upcoming multiroom HD DVR system and have the Spaceway Dish (5LNB dish). Now I've heard that they are planning on offering sometype of sending device for a customers dish as well as allowing a customer to use their broadband connection that is connected to the server. Now each server would have about 25GB of space reserved for On Demand use only.
So you would have a new channel for say HBO On Demand and you select a show via an interactive menu system and once you select and play a show it will be sent via the dish sender or via the internet at which time your boxes access card would be authorized to download the movie from the spaceway satellite. That movie would be downloaded to the reserved space on the servers hard drive and will start playing right away as the download finishes. The complete download should take anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes depending on how many customers are using ON Demand at that specific time (using would be downloading). The show would stay on the hard drive for most likely 12 hours or if you start a new ON Demand movie the old one would be deleted to allow the new one to start downloading.
I hope this gives you an idea. Also I've heard that they plan on encoding the movies in a VBR MPEG4 format for small size files compared to say MPEG2. I've also heard that WMV9 might be used along with WMA9 Pro for 5.1 decoding. I've heard that the box could convert the WMA9 Pro 5.1 audio into a 5.1 PCM wave file that pretty much all DD5.1 receivers can decode. It just depends on what they decide to use.
