ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the distribution technologies of all of the visual electronic media—terrestrial broadcast, cable, direct broadcast satellite, wireless cable, and packaged programming—and the production systems required to feed them. Advanced Television is an agglomeration of techniques, based largely on digital signal processing and transmission, that permits far more program material to be carried through channels than existing analog systems can manage. In this sense, High Definition Television (HDTV) is a subset of Advanced Television (ATV). There are a number of systems proposed for ATV. They fall into the two categories of HDTV and Multichannel systems. All of them utilize pretty much the same underlying compression technologies, arranged in ways that their proponents feel will result in better performance. The High Definition systems, all under evaluation by the FCC Advisory Committee and the Advanced Television Test Center, together with their proponents, are listed.
