The DISH Network has announced that they will become the first in the industry to offer all SD and HD transmissions in the MPEG-4 AVC standard.
Although competitor DIRECTV already offers all HD programming in the MPEG-4 AVC they only offer a portion of their SD programming in the standard.
At launch, only 21 markets in the US will have the full MPEG-4 AVC rollout with other markets receiving later.
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Originally posted by tatsh: At the end of the day, is MPEG-2 just better than MPEG-4 (hence the reason why most companies are STILL using it as a standard even for HD content)?
MPEG-4 is better -- it provides much better video and audio quality on the same bitrate as MPEG-2 does. The main reason behind MPEG-2's widespread use, AFAIK, is the fact that most of world's professional video shooting, editing and transmitting devices, software and embedded solutions are from "MPEG-2 era" and replacing them in one bang would cost billions and billions of dollars. Thus, the slow transition. Furthermore, in satellite, the "bandwidth" available is much cheaper and more easily available, so that the need for a better compression technology (MPEG-4) isn't as critical as in some other transmission types (antenna/"broadcast TV", to some extend cable and, of course, IPTV).
Basically, to produce similar video quality, using 1080p, MPEG-2 needs at least twice the bitrate and bandwidth as the same quality video would require when using MPEG-4.
