Chapter 3 Digitally Compressed Television
3.1 Introduction
This chapter introduces digital compression, transport, and transmission for television signals, particularly as they relate to cable systems. However, it is worth taking a moment to consider why the cable industry has transformed itself to embrace digital technology. After all, in the mid-1990s the cable industry was starting a hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) upgrade program to expand channel capacity to greater than 100 analog channels. Why then was digital technology adopted so rapidly in the late 1990s after many HFC upgrades had already been completed?
Digital compression was first applied to moving images in video conferencing applications.1 From there, interest in its application to ...
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