Distributed Encoding Architectures

The adoption of internet protocol (IP) technology into the broadcast industry has enabled a move from co-located encoding and multiplexing solutions to new solutions in which the encoding stage is pushed to the content provider. This removes the requirements for contribution encoding and re-encoding for final distribution. In a distributed encode solution, content is encoded with the philosophy “encoded once—distribute many.” This saves an additional encode stage, conserves transmission bandwidth between the content provider and headends, and reduces network demand, lowering distribution cost while increasing capacity. Direct-to-home (DTH) headends typically operate statistical multiplexing (SM) to maximize quality and content delivery to the subscriber over the distribution pipe.

Print ISSN

1545-0279

Electronic ISSN

2160-2492

Published

2008-01

Content type

Information

DOI

10.5594/J16017