A couple of comments:
"It's also a chicken-and-egg scenario. .... because by the time it reaches your house your local cable or satellite operator has compressed your 1.5Gb/s signal down to between 4Mb/s and 10Mb/s typically, making the quality gains negligible."
-It's not a chicken/egg scenario. It's Garbage in/Garbage out. That's why you start with a Higher bandwidth signal to allow the codec more numbers to compress (more info) which will allow for a better, finer final compressed product.
"It will solve one problem, which is image degradation due to multiple passes of compression."
-No. The only product I am aware that handles multi-generational video compression compensation is the MOLE product from Snell and Wilcox.
http://www.broadcastpapers.com/whitepapers/MPEG-2-CLONING-USING-MOLE-TECHNOLOGY.cfm?objid=32&pid=100&fromCategory=49
"... gets ASI compressed into 270Mb/s (best case scenario, satellite transmission is significantly lower bandwidth, and most networks don't use an entire 270M circuit, they use less).
-No. ASI is a Transports stream that clocks at 270Mb/s and you can Multiplex many MPEG2/4 bitstreams inside of it. That's how we serve 2 HD and 3 SD channels over one line to our Transmitter.
" It then arrives at the network hub, where it gets decompressed. If it's live it then goes through several switchers and graphics boxes, then gets re-compressed to ASI and sent either to another hub or to your local affiliate. (If not live, it gets put into a server which re-compresses the video even harder before playout.)"
-Yes/No. Source Video from Satellite, Tape, ASI over Fiber is De-muxe'd and De-coded,(now the video is uncompressed) and then re-ingested into that facilities Video Servers and compressed/stored at their "house" standard. (Typically MPEG2@40Mb/s for HD, MPGE2@15Mb/s for SD. ) If it's files based video, it is FTP'd to a Xcoder and transcoded to the house standard and stored on their Video Servers(Omneon, GVG, Harris, etc.) ..
"re-compresses it into its final 3-12Mb/s data stream for your receiver to decompress one final time."
-Correct.
"This would eliminate several compression steps, and mean a better final image quality because you're not recompressing compression artifacts over and over and over again."
-Again, this has been solved. (see Snell) No one adopted it. No one will until it makes business sense.
" (also a best-case scenario, most cable/broadcast/sat providers ramp up the bitrate to the max for live sports and then set it back down shortly thereafter)."
-Correct. Talking heads get 3-4Mb/s MPEG2 where as sports/NASCAR (high motion, high color) get 9-12Mb/s, and that's after pre-processing usually.
"But the 100Gb/s makes no sense to me. Are you (crazy) overcompensating for latency? Are you sending 100% redundant data for error correction? "
-Agreed. Ethernet was never designed for a Live swtiched signal. It's a game of how much risk you are willing to accept in a packet based world. It is possible, with FEC (Forward Error Correction) that this can be acheived though. See SMPTE-2202 parts1&2
https://secure.connect.pbs.org/pbsdocuments/Solutions/Conferences/Technology/2011/Presentations/Whitcomb_Real-time_Professional_Broadcast_Signals_Over_IP_Networks.pdf
"Plus you'd want at least two circuits anyways in case your primary circuit goes down for some reason."
-Absolutely necessary. In fact, typical Primary feeds are done over SAT and backup is done over Fiber on the ground.
Now, with respect to the Article.
Can schemes be developed to make an Ethernet Switch act like an un-compressed Switched Circuit Digital Video Router.
Sure. With enough cache, bit-rate, and internal packet routing intelligence, I believe it can be solved.
(Via hyper fast FEC, you could solve all packet loss's. ie. I can move 100 times faster then a normal human being, therefore, I will catch that person from falling before they even begin to fall or know they are falling)
Will it take a gross amount of engineering to solve it that problem, more then likely.
The internal Switch Fabric must operate at a 10-100 fold increase in order handle the amount of schemes necessary to ensure sub-frame(picture) delivery latency requirements. O ya, it needs to scale too. I can purchase a 3Gb/s HD-SDI Signal Switch Router with a 1152x1152 config where I can take input 1 and output to all 1152 and vice verse as needed and it will frame accurately switch those signals. This super Ethernet switch scheme will need to accommodate this as well.
Again, it's possible, but would you want to do it? Is it more Rube Goldberg then reality?
