Actually, I'd be delighted with 1.5 Mbps, so needing less than that is great news. A few jobs back, I worked in distributing MPEG-2 files to network affiliates and cable headends, and we were required to work in the 6-8 Mbps range (and some wanted to go up to 10). So, that kind of business could achieve a near order-of-magnitude bandwidth improvement by moving to H.264.

But at any rate, I think your point is that the stress of the 1.5 Mbps, 640x480 encode in this article is more than is actually required by real-world SDTV, right?

-Chris