How is "Best of XM" being transmitted?

my Sirius Starmate Replay ST2 used to hold about 43 minutes of Howard Stern when i jump all the way back.

Now... I get about 54 minutes.
 
How they did it no one knows unless you are inside at Sirius, but I've always heard they've never used absolutely all their bandwidth. I also think as the codecs have improved and the technology changes that have been made, they've learned to stretch the bandwidth without it so much impacting SQ. Though there are those that will say the SQ is terrible. I've never been one to complain about it.
 
I'd imagine Sirius did it the same way XM did... dropped bitrates on some (or many) of the channels... reduced quality on some talk channels (i.e. from stereo to mono; who needs talk in stereo just because the channel also plays a little bit of music?)... things like that. Bandwidth "stretching" as DAB put it...
 
It hasn't happened yet, but there will be even more channels added... As condition of the merger they are going to have to add 'educational and public interest channels'. I'm guessing 12 on Sirius and 12 on XM.

From the FCC document below:

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-284108A1.pdf

Make available 4 percent of its capacity for use by certain Qualified Entities, and an additional 4 percent of capacity for the delivery of noncommercial educational or informational ("NCE) programming, which will enhance the diversity of programming available to consumers.
Click to expand...

Don't take this as gospel, but I recall reading that they improved the CODECS in order to add the extra channels without taking a big hit in bandwidth. I looked for the article that I read, but can't find it... (Maybe it only existed in my head :) )
 
One thing that someone said, I think it was Scott that the video on the Backseat Video seemed more compressed and not quite as good. So, they also may have robbed a little bandwidth from there. Clearly they are just tighting up the across the board. Since most of these channels were not music channels they don't require nearly the bandwidth. This is why they didn't offer any music channels. It just was not feasible bandwidth wise.
 
They normally squeeze the BW out of encoding compression improvements. However I think this last time with the Best of XM, I actually am starting to notice a difference in SQ.

If they add more channels without deletting some, I'm afraid the SQ will become unbearable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom