With a number of recent high-profile service announcements, it may appear that high definition (HD) has finally begun its foray into the region in earnest. But the reality is that far from being a wave, HD seems more like a trickle in Asia so far, and there are several reasons for that.

To start with, there is still a regional divide when it comes to HD services in Asia and, unsurprisingly, the fault line goes right along the bandwidth divide: Whereas broadcasters or service providers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia are showing increasing interest, other markets in Asia do not have much appetite for HD yet.

The slow spread of HD is due to multiple reasons — and, surprisingly, content isn't one of them. It's a myth that there isn't enough HD content available in the market, since most major studios around the world are already recording their content in HD format.

The real issue is how to distribute HD content to subscribers at low bandwidth but high quality, something that the two dominant encoding standards, MPEG-2 and H.264, don't deliver, or at least not yet. MPEG-2 technology may provide good quality but requires high bandwidth, while H.264 is low on bandwidth use but is not yet mature and still expensive. This gives bandwidth-rich markets a natural head start and explains the current HD divide in Asia.

A good example for this is Japan, which has no bandwidth issues and consequently has had broadcast HD services for some time and is well ahead of the rest of the world. Japan's excellent network infrastructure means that operators are able to use the MPEG-2 encoding format for HD broadcast, which provides better quality than H.264 HD with the tradeoff that it needs around twice as much bandwidth.

But using MPEG-2 also gives operators ready access to an abundance of mature broadcast head-end equipment and relatively mature MPEG-2 HD set-top boxes (STBs), which lower the overall cost for an MPEG-2 HD broadcast platform. This contrasts with a lack of reliable, good-quality HD STBs for H.264. And besides the decoding glitches, there are also interoperability issues between H.264 HD STBs and H.264 HD encoders from different vendors, which add another dimension of complexity to an operator's decision-making process.

Another factor is cost of HD equipment. The cost of an H.264 HD encoder is currently roughly double that of an MPEG-2 HD encoder, and there is a high chance for some of the current H.264 HD encoders to become obsolete and give way to more mature models within a year or two. Of course there are some unorthodox alternatives where some operators are simply getting a HD CAM tape from the content provider, encoding it locally, and playing the content out from a video server. But while this may save cost, it unfortunately doesn't work for live content.

HD H.264 STBs are also still relatively expensive by the standards of a majority of countries in Asia. Their current market price is between U.S. $150–300, depending on volume and features. To really become more widely attractive, STB costs in Asia should be between U.S. $50–100.

In China, the country's determination to promote its home-grown encoding technology, audio video coding standard (AVS), and digital broadcast technology, digital multimedia broadcasting for television (DMB-T), is creating its own issues.

While AVS is similar to, but not necessarily better than, H.264, China's push for developing its own standard is motivated by wanting to avoid paying licence fees to MPEG LA and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for using the H.264 standard, which was jointly developed by the two bodies. It will be interesting to see how the AVS standard will evolve and a fair few people will probably bet that a country such as China, with its huge population and runaway economic growth, will eventually lead rather than follow. But in the meantime this standards issue will certainly delay the overall deployment of HD services in China.

And finally, regardless of which technology is used, since satellite transponder costs can easily exceed U.S. $1 million a year, an operator needs to first and foremost be sure he is getting value for money, i.e., high value content.

So here is the dilemma: H.264 HD still has some way to go to match MPEG-2's features and quality, but markets where bandwidth is an issue have little choice but go for less mature and more expensive bit-rate encoding technologies for their broadcast or video-on-demand services. It's a catch-22 situation that lies at the heart of the slow spread of HD in Asia and will continue to be an issue at least for another two years or so.