The 8008 was: Blinky lights WAS: The SR71 Blackbird was designed ENTIRELYwith slide rules 653

Cable modems are heavily oversubscribed; there may be dozens or hundreds of people in your cell sharing a single 6Mb-s channel. You need 1.5-2Mb-s per TV to do realtime video at HD resolution, but obviously if you push most content during the off hours that can be lower.

Now, if they went to IP completely, they might be able to get the number of STBs per channel down to an acceptable level, but as long as they're pushing 100+ channels of scheduled content (either analog or digital), they won't have the bandwidth to pull it off. The fiber plant does, and the coax may even have enough, but the repeaters at each cell do not.

And yes, you could have some sort of bidirectional non-IP digital distribution system, but why bother? MPEG transport streams have similar overhead to an MPEG program stream being moved by TCP, and an IP network can be used for many other interesting things.

You can store 800-900 programs, buttuming they mean one-hour (~42 minutes) episodes, on a single PC HD today -- not that any one user is likely to ever need that much at one time.

A lot of it's available on BitTorrent -- several years' worth in fact :)

Let's face it, if any reasonably-savvy computer user can figure out how to do this stuff for free, a cable company charging $50-mo can figure out how to bring the technology to the clueless mbuttes.

S

-- Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do." K5SSS --Isaac Asimov