It's unlikely that DISH or DirecTV can push to YOU uniquely 40Mbit/s to your satellite, so I'm calling BS on that. In fact, this "HD" stuff that all video manufacturers are pushing is really shady. 4-6Mbit/s is barely DVD quality!
That's not how Dish On Demand works. Dish's On Demand service integrates with your DVR, using a portion of the hard disk dedicated to that service and only that service. When you select a movie to watch "on demand", you're actually playing back something that was recorded on the hard disk the night before.
If it was a case of streaming something individually to you, then it wouldn't scale at all, even if it was SD. To be honest, I doubt it would scale if it was VCD quality!
If there's at least 50Gb of space available on those hard disks, then there's no reason in theory - beyond the fact that Dish presumably wants to save bandwidth - why a complete BD image couldn't be saved in that space.
squiggleslash, there could be 20-30 HD movies available "on demand", plus popular TV series, sports games and anything else a provider thinks they can get away charging people for watching "on demand". All of which must be downloaded overnight. There are very clear constraints on bandwidth and local storage which mean it is extremely unlikely that a VOD movie would ever approach Blu-ray sizes.
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It's unlikely that DISH or DirecTV can push to YOU uniquely 40Mbit/s to your satellite, so I'm calling BS on that. In fact, this "HD" stuff that all video manufacturers are pushing is really shady. 4-6Mbit/s is barely DVD quality!
That's not how Dish On Demand works. Dish's On Demand service integrates with your DVR, using a portion of the hard disk dedicated to that service and only that service. When you select a movie to watch "on demand", you're actually playing back something that was recorded on the hard disk the night before.
If it was a case of streaming something individually to you, then it wouldn't scale at all, even if it was SD. To be honest, I doubt it would scale if it was VCD quality!
If there's at least 50Gb of space available on those hard disks, then there's no reason in theory - beyond the fact that Dish presumably wants to save bandwidth - why a complete BD image couldn't be saved in that space.
squiggleslash, there could be 20-30 HD movies available "on demand", plus popular TV series, sports games and anything else a provider thinks they can get away charging people for watching "on demand". All of which must be downloaded overnight. There are very clear constraints on bandwidth and local storage which mean it is extremely unlikely that a VOD movie would ever approach Blu-ray sizes.