Splice Is In, Switch Is Out

Years after I saw the first Master Control program stream splicer at NAB
years ago in the A.F. Associates booth comes this pearl of wisdom from
John Luff in the January ’09 issue of Broadcast
Engineering: "One might argue that a splicer is not a master control
system, but to be perfectly honest, it isn’t far from one."

Just think of how much better the picture quality would be if we used
2-pass MPEG-2 encoding on our primetime shows. (Or even better, how many
more digital program streams we could stat-mux if our main program had a
lower bitrate.)