Patent ID: 7602846

Claim:
A method of operating an apparatus including a first-video-compression-method-to-second-video-compression-method transcoder for transporting a video program to a second location, the method comprising: receiving at a first intermediate location a first compressed version of the video program, the first compressed version compressed using a first video compression method, the first compressed version transported from a source location to the first intermediate location over a first segment that includes a link of a first type for which video program streams compressed using the first video compression method are suited; carrying out video-compression-method-to-different-video-compression-method transcoding of the first compressed version to a second compressed version of the video program using the first-video-compression-method-to-second-video-compression-method transcoder, the second compressed version compressed using a second video compression method; and sending the second compressed version to the second location over a second segment that includes a link of a second type, the link of the second type including infrastructure to transport video program streams compressed using the second video compression method, wherein the second video compression method is relatively in widespread use, wherein the first video compression method can achieve a higher compression ratio than the second video compression method for approximately the same image quality, and wherein the video program is provided at the source location in a third version of the video program compressed using the second video compression method, such that the method comprises at the source location carrying out video-compression-method-to-different-video-compression transcoding of the third compressed version of the video program to the first compressed version using a second-video-compression-method-to-first-video-compression-method transcoder, the second compressed version compressed using the second video compression method.