
The number of televisions estimated that sit unused in closets.
The EPA estimates that nearly 100 million unused televisions are currently taking up precious, beautiful space. (source: EPA, July 2008)
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The only Blu-ray discs that have a maximum bit rate exceeding 30Mbps (total, including seven different soundtrack and a PIP feed) are those encoded using MPEG2. The only reason Blu-ray supports rates higher than 30Mbps is that the original spec mandated MPEG2.
And your comment about Blu-ray "being compressed already" is completely irrelevant. Or do you think that Dish's set-up involves buying a Blu-ray disc, ripping the contents, recompressing it, and streaming it at whatever rate they stream at? And you spelt "losing" wrong.
Dish could, in theory (they don't, but they technically can - which is what the BDA is saying they can't) take the raw unencrypted feed from a Blu-ray disk and transmit it directly, without recompression, to their customers. There's nothing technically stopping them from doing that. They could do that even if the source BD was MPEG2 and had a CBR of 50Mbps (I'd like to see that disk!). Their bandwidth isn't measured in tens of megabits, it's measured in gigabits.
If they did that, there'd be no difference in quality whatsoever between Blu-ray and HD VOD.
What the BDA is saying is that this is technically impossible. They're lying. It's technically possible, it's just it's unlikely Dish are doing this.