Well the slow pace at adding new HD has me wondering if it's bandwidth that is the problem. More so now seeing at least 4 tp's labeled "PUSH" (D12 21,22,23,24). That's at least 20 possible HD channels that cannot be offered because of that space.
This is why I'm a heavy advocate for maximizing the bandwidth usage with creative channel multiplexes, statistical multiplexing and intelligent mixes of 5:1, 6:1, 7:1 and maybe 8:1 compression per transponder.
Valuable sports, heavy action channels and high bandwidth stuff can stay the way it is (5:1 compression). However the slower paced or less popular can do any sort of mix from 6:1 to 8:1. Really does home shopping, talking heads, cspan, cartoons, etc.. need to be 5:1? Not like there's dramatic sports action scenes or huge multi-million dollar hollywood special effects.
If 8mbps MPEG4 = 16mbps MPEG2.. well cable providers have a few multiplexes running 3:1 compression. At their 38.8mbps 256QAM channel modulation, that's 12.93mbps per stream MPEG2. This works because they have very expensive encoders from Imagine Communications which analyze all incoming streams and regroom them appropriately. Maybe for a few seconds one of the channels peaks at 18mbps, but the encoder allows this because the action or scene on the other two channels is not currently in a high demand. Of course, the correct combination of channels needs to be picked for this to work without a noticeable quality loss. In the beginning Comcast Media Center made some bad decisions on what they were re-grooming and sending on their AMC18 satellite to cable operators. They've since rebalanced what channels are encoded together and it made a drastic improvement.
