Cox Cable Wants 50 HD Channels by End of Year

Ever since DIRECTV began blasting the airwaves with its HD marketing campaign featuring various celebrities touting the 150 HD channels DIRECTV will soon offer, cable companies have been making various statements playing up their own HD capacity. Time Warner said a few weeks ago that switched digital video technology would give it virtually "unlimited" capacity for new HD channels. Comcast came out a few days later and said that it would soon offer 800 HD "viewing choices" by the end of next year, the vast majority of which would be HD video on demand programs.

Now Cox Cable is getting in on the act, with its president telling attendees at a conference yesterday that he wants his chief technology officer to find the bandwidth for 50 HD channels by the end of this year. Using a combination of methods, such as the aforementioned switched digital video, bandwidth optimization and the elimination of some analog channels, Cox hopes to be able to technically offer 50 high-def channels -- but whether or not it actually does so is to be determined. According to the president, Pat Esser, "Whether we do or don’t offer that many channels, I want to have the capacity to do that."