Plans for BBC One HD

[Orry Verducci]

My understanding is that the encoders for iplayer are fed in the same way as the encoders for terrestrial and satellite.

So why they aren't HD yet I don't know, maybe its a case of upgrading the streaming side?

I suspect it's a money thing (for the Beeb). Whereas they presumably pass Virgin and Sky good old baseband SDI streams (straight off the back of a DA), for them to encode, the iplayer streams are encoded 'in house' and so fall under the BBC's capex budget for this (the world's longest) project !

That's very likely the case. Virgin and Sky (in the case of Sky Glass) are responsible for the encoding on their platforms, so they would have been the ones who took on the cost of switching to HD. In the case of Sky Glass they had the advantage of setting up a new platform at the same time the BBC were planning to switch, so they were able to start out in HD.

In the case of satellite (Sky/Freesat) and Freeview as the BBC use their own infrastructure it's up to the BBC to fund costs themselves, so the timescales will be different. It's also worth mentioning that they need to purchase a lot of infrastructure (i.e. many encoders) to make this happen, and with the chip shortages and shipping delays the lead times on broadcast gear is a lot longer than any of us would like at the moment. I'm refitting a facility at the moment and the lead times I'm being given have gone from the usual couple of weeks to 3-6 months. No doubt the BBC will have been hit with this too.