Bandwidth

I was thinking about this last night. Since the new MPEG-4 equipment will be backwards compatible with MPEG-2 technology wouldn't Directv in the future have even more bandwidth available to them when all locals are switched to MPEG-4? What I mean is, for a while Directv will be broadcasting local channels in both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, but there will come a time when all of the MPEG-2 end and everything will be MPEG-4 and Directv will not have to broadcast two versions of everyones local channels. At that time, I would think that would open-up a tremendous amount of available bandwidth for Directv to do other things with (More National HD, Video On Demand-VOD, More Interactive Services). Am I correct?

~Josh

One would think and hope that a good amount of bandwidth would open up for other uses; like more NFL and MLB HD games would be nice. Hopefully more PPV HD channels would be possible and more HD premium channels too!