Cable Forum - BT Sport in 4k UHD - BT TV customers only

Heya,

Just wanted to mention that BT appear to be the first to bring a 4k Ultra HD channel to market here.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php...t-top-box.html
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7...announced.html

It will be delivered via IPTV, using BT Openreach's Fibre Multicast service. To order the service a customer must have a minimum downstream speed estimate of 44Mb/s.

The stream itself is expected to require in the region of 20-30Mb/s.

I've no idea where Sky or VM are as far as 4k goes. VM are, I believe, still using MPEG2 for their broadcast channels, while Sky are using MPEG4 AVC, and both deliver at 1080i only.

Both would need, obviously, to deliver a new STB, and for Sky satellite bandwidth is expensive - an entire Astra transponder delivers 43.88Mb/s for picture, sound, data, everything, so not much room left on a transponder once a 4k channel has been placed there.

In VM's case they are both doing work to use their existing network capacity more efficiently, and they are progressively rebuilding networks that are a little short of capacity, largely to supply additional bandwidth for IP services and replace restricted return path components with components that are field upgradeable to full DOCSIS 3.1 high-split return path.

I doubt either will be that far behind, but both might allow BT a moment in the sun given 4k is still quite niche, and whether either are going to rush an STB refresh is debatable.