Multichoice operator of South Africas only pay-tv service DSTV, has announced that in the comming nine months it will launch a additional three HD (High defenition) channels. These three HD channels will include a dedicated sports channel called SuperSport HD, and 2 other channels dedicated to movies and documentaries probably Movie Magic HD and perhaps DiscoveryHD or NatGeoHD.

Previous speculation was that the three new channels from DSTV would have come at an extra cost but according to Multichoice the three channels wil be available to DSTV HD subscribers at no extra cost.

All the new channels will be broadcast at a resolution of 720p using MPEG-4.

Multichoice took some heavy critic from the public with the release of their buggy HD PVR decoder that was plagued by software bugs that caused some early adopters to revert back to the SD PVR.

The price of the HD Decoder is also another reason why the addoption of the HD service is slow, although it was launched at a kind of reasonable price of R2500.00 it now retails for a astranomical R4000.00. To address this high price issue Multichoice has commissioned a new HD PVR with a smaller HDD which should retail for about R2000.00.

Multichoice also plans to release a new software update for the HD PVR during November that will enable video on demand for the device.

According to a user on the DSTV forums the MNetHD channel’s bitrate has been dropped from previously 12Mbps to 10Mbps.  Now the question is how can this be proven and what impact does a 2Mbps drop have?

DSTV runs on the Intelsat 7, 10 satelite and the owners of the satelite has quite allot of details about the channels available on the internet. A simple browse to http://www.satcodx3.com/ will reveal a list of satalites with information about all the channels on each satelite. Upon browsing to Intelsat 7, 10′s channels and choosing to view the MNetHD graph we can clearly see the drop in bitrate.

So now the question is how does this affect the quality of the channel? Well lets just say that a standard dstv SD channels’ bitrate is 2Mbps, this means that MNetHD’s quality dropped by a whole SD channels quality. The bad thing about this is that even before Multichoice lowered the bitrate, it was still way below the norm of HD channels out there. If we take DiscoveryHD, a channel that is not on the DSTV bouquete, for example it runs at a amazing 19.75Mbps. Now that is true HD quality.

Multichoice aparrently deleted the thread on their site about the posts revealing this and later on brought it back but merged it under a picture breakup thread.

Multichoice should just stop their anti competativeness, just a few months back we got a price increase, now that more and more people are starting to use the HD channel they are dropping bitrates in a effort I believe to save on satelite bandwidth costs. Come on multichoice, get real and start offering us a real HD channel with real HD quality, and perhapes more than just 1 HD channel. Stop trying to bullshit the consumers by trying to cover up changes like this or not even anouncing it.