ABSTRACT
Digital consumer applications which started in the mid-1990s by the first satellite TV transmissions in the USA and France, are now part of the consumer electronics landscape at the beginning of the third millenium. Digital cable television, and even digital terrestrial television in some countries, has now taken a significant share of the market. However, many evolutions in receiver functionalities as well as services proposed to the users are to be expected in the near future. Functional integration continues inexorably, thanks to the availability of ever smaller geometries, which made possible, at the dawn of 2000, the integration of the processor and its peripherals with the source decoder, video encoder and sometimes the audio digital-to-analogue conversion. This deficiency and the concomitant phenomenal capacity increase and price decrease of hard disks since the end of the 1990s have allowed set makers to integrate them in high-end set-top boxes.
