Ascent Media Network Services, a provider of outsourced network origination services to the media and entertainment industry, today announced key milestones in the launch of uncompressed high definition (HD) video transport via Ascent's Midtown Manhattan switching facility.

Ascent announced that it has secured initial...

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For those of us non-techies who have no clue (like me) what this means, can you explain it in laymen's terms, Shane?

I knew this question would come. I was struggling with that myself reading through the press release. Perhaps Dale can provide further insight, but here's my take:

From what I read, it appears as though content providers are beginning to push uncompressed HD content around to various distributors. One could guess or assume that since the quality remains in tact further down the chain, when it finally reaches the consumer it will have gone through fewer conversions and compressions and would ideally look better, having been processed less.

I'm not sure what other reason the content providers and distributors would have for pushing around uncompressed HD if it weren't for eventual benefit to the viewer/consumer.

At any rate, reading the press release, it seemed to be a "first", so I thought it would be interesting to at least see the discussion of what it may mean to the consumer. Perhaps we have some video techs watching here that might also provide further details.

- Shane

Taking a SWAG...

HD video originates as full bandwidth RGB 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 but HD as we know and use it is 4:2:0 which means color is less than half resolution of luminance (b/w). So what this might mean is that this facility has enough bandwidth to handle 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 for distribution to broadcasters and editing facilities prior to further compression, 4:2:0 for mass distribution consumer broadcast.