Wednesday, January 19, 2011

World's First Terrestrial 3D TV Service Starts in Italy

The world's first terrestrial 3D TV service officially went live last week, following a successful trial by Italian broadcaster Mediaset.

The service, known as 3VOD, runs on Motive's Bestv set top box, offers subscribers the ability to view films from a selection of around 50 films. It was originally offered as a limited trial to subscribers from late last year.

Previously 3D TV was limited to high-bandwidth pay-tv on satellite and cable platforms. The problem with 3D TV is its very large filesizes—with two images per frame, films are literally twice the size of 2D shows.

What 3VOD does is to trickle the movie file to the Bestv set-top box throughout the day and night. The box stores the film on its hard drive. Trickling small amounts of data allows the broadcaster to extract the maximum value out of any under-used bandwidth. Typically broadcasters transmit up to seven TV channels in what is known as a “multiplex”.

Although it describes itself as video on demand, 3VOD is not a conventional VoD service like the U.S. Netflix. Instead users are able to watch from a limited set of choices. Unlike true VoD services where the files are stored on a remote server and streamed in real-time to the user, 3VOD stores the files locally on a set top box.

For the complete article, please click here.

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