Have you ever wondered of the time widespread conversion from the older analog systems to all digital systems? Here’s a little about it.
The conversion to digital provides many benefits in this area, such as reduced cost, higher image quality, and better audio, and this when it works. Digital compression techniques reduce bandwidth requirements, and allow more channels to fit on cheaper equipment.
Now let’s take a look at the advantage of digital. It’s the use of compression technology, using microprocessors to remove redundancy in the video signal and transmit the minimum needed to generate the end video image.
Digital has one big problem though. When faced with a noisy signal it either can fix it 100% or fail 100%, with no in between. Using analog, the picture quality steadily decreases till there is just noise and snow on the screen. In many cases this is more desirable then getting nothing at all. With the conversion to HDTV, many people will get amazing video quality and many who ordinarily get a poor, but viewable TV signal will now get nothing at all!
Most people who work with Internet video it becomes apparent that they do not have “signal noise” as such, but instead have packet loss. This means that data they get is 99.99999% correct, if they got the data at all! Loosing at times 20% of the data sent across the Internet was not uncommon at that time. With the early Internet video products loosing over 5% of the data packets would cause no video to ever show up on end users screen.
