Cable Television Systems – CATV connect content providers to viewers.
CATV Services - Providing content for free, for subscription, or for pay per view. Inserting promotional messages (advertising) for companies on a fee basis. Providing data connections for Internet access and other data connection services. Providing and managing audio connections to the public telephone network. Presenting catalogs, processing orders, and accepting payments for products and services.
CATV Systems – are composed of contribution networks, headend, distribution, and access systems.
- Contribution networks gather content for distribution to viewers.
- A cable headend is the main selection, processing, and distribution center for the cable system.
- A cable distribution network is usually composed of a core (high-speed) system that transports all the content to access distribution points.
- The access portion of CATV systems provides the signals to homes. The home media network portion of the CATV system distributes the media signals within the home.
Cable TV systems are converting from analog transmission to digital broadcast systems and digital broadcast systems are transitioning from proprietary transmission formats to more standard packet data transmission formats.
Industry Standards- Analog video standards NTSC and PAL are still used by many users. MPEG is a set of industry standards that defines how media is compressed and packaged (MPEG-2, MPEG-4), described (MPEG-7) and transported (MPEG-TS). DOCSIS defines how cable modems can be used to access the Internet. The PacketCable specification defines how digital voice and other multimedia services can be sent over a digital cable system