insight :: the evolution of broadcast media
Posts tagged cable tv
CATV: Learn something new every day
Oct 14th
I always assumed that CATV was an acronym for “CAble Television” – alas, the Nico was mistaken (I know, go figure) CATV originally was “community antenna television” which later became “Community Access Television” and now it is often just associated with Cable TV.
Take a glimpse into broadcast history – this all sounds like streaming media to me:
Franklin, Curt. “How Cable Television Works.” 13 September 2000. HowStuffWorks.com 14 October 2008.Another benefit that came from the move to fiber-optic cable was greater customization. Since a single fiber-optic cable might serve 500 households, it became possible to target individual neighborhoods for messages and services. In the 1990s, cable providers found this same neighborhood grouping to be ideal for creating a local-area network and providing Internet access through cable modems.
In 1989, General Instruments demonstrated that it was possible to convert an analog cable signal to digital and transmit it in a standard 6-MHz television channel. Using MPEG compression, CATV systems installed today can transmit up to 10 channels of video in the 6-MHz bandwidth of a single analog channel. When combined with a 550-MHz overall bandwidth, this allows the possibility of nearly 1,000 channels of video on a system. In addition, digital technology allows for error correction to ensure the quality of the received signal.
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 ©Copyright 2004 Scientific-Atlanta, Inc. The Explorer 8000HD Home Entertainment Server features digital reception and DVR capabilities. |
–> The move to digital technology also changed the quality of one of cable television’s most visible features: the scrambled channel.
If you would like more on the origin of “CATV” – go here: Franklin, Curt. “How Cable Television Works.” 13 September 2000. HowStuffWorks.com 14 October 2008.
Oooh, that's splice-y!
Oct 11th
I’d like to introduce this blog in a way that makes sense to the world outside of my own mind – the evolution of this blog is somewhat convoluted today, as is the time in which we are now working – and especially so, as I am about to launch a new business on Wall Street in New York City, during a financial crisis
I am currently working on building out an HD fiber solution pointing to Azzurro, here in New York City, from a Wall Street conference center.
Verizon Business HD DVTS field engineers came to the space in Wall Street last Friday to do a site survey, they followed fiber through shaft-ways and floor boards and determined that the fiber was live but they couldn’t track down exactly where the splice led to.This is common in New York City, apparently the fiber in question was first dropped in 01/2008 and the engineer who did it is no longer “available” to fulfill the work-order. A random splice that leads to somewhere, just not exactly sure where somewhere is.
Although my active background focused on Enterprise technology, having served 7 years at JPMorganChase HQ in NYC, I spent a lot of time working in and around the Enterprise infrastructure building out their streaming media solutions – through 3 mergers, multiple integrations and “refresh” projects – and I tell you what… the corporate enterprise and the infrastructures we find in the large cities translate quite literally by a matter of scale, only varying by the number of “boxes” and dependencies crammed into what some may just sum up as the “cloud” – I reject the whole concept of the cloud – they do translate quite literally, with all the same vulnerabilities, bubble-gum hybrid cross-connects and good intentions.