17 section members and guests met at the North Farmington High School TV Studio where Paul Braun, Product Manager for Motorola's Broadband Communications Sector presented a program on the present state of DTV over cable. An overview was first given to familiarize us with the process of getting some of the 300-400 programs available on satellite demodulated, subjected to Forward Error Correction, decrypted and then remodulated to an IF signal and sent to the Broadcast Digital Headend.
Out of band data paths were then discussed, these to provide a downstream connection to the subscriber's set top box, permitting data like electronic program guides, initialization info, channel mapping and EAS emergency info to reach viewers as required. While Telco paths have typically been used for Pay-Per-View requests, they have not proved useful for other applications, necessitating an RF return, which most cable operators employ as their upstream data path.
DOCSIS, the digital over cable standard was then discussed as well as the various functions controllable through access control such as programming, services and sources, configuration of set top boxes, anti-taping code downloads and encryption.
This led to a discussion of how access control can be scaled to national, local and regional levels allowing such things as clustering of networks providing for better coordination of local services across regions.
Remultiplexing was then discussed as it relates to the ability of local cable operators to streamline data density by selecting just those services they want to extract from satellite signals. Statistical (rate recoding) and non-statistical (manually controlled) bit rates were touched upon as well.
Digital ad insertion by means of a combination of re-multiplexing and addition of an ad server as well as interactive networks utilizing out of band and in band paths were also mentioned as well as advanced