by Richard Lochmann,
Director of Engineering KFMB-TV

by Alan J. Levi,
Independent Hollywood Director/Producer

by Ariel Diaz Osorio,
Vice President of Engineering, WMTJ

by Randy Cassimus,
Director of Production, KWTV

With a wide choice of compression schemes available, and even more on the horizon, we could be looking at a future that is not so much Variable Bit-Rate as Very Baskin-Robbins.

Since the launch of color TV in the 1960s, high-definition (HD) television has been one of the industry’s greatest advances.

The era of HD news is upon us, later than the earliest visionaries may have forecast, but also more suddenly than many expected. Nine years and two months after the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 defined the digital television landscape for the U.S., and four years and a month after the originally mandated date for auction of analog channels, HD news has in the past few months become a key marketing differentiator for local news offerings in large U.S. television markets.

Digital Television (DTV) permits broadcasters to deliver more channels of programming over their allotted digital spectrum, allowing local stations to send multiple simultaneous streams otherwise known as "multicasting". Because of network affiliations, broadcasters are limited in the amount of local broadcasting time available over their traditional channel. Therefore, digital multicasting allows broadcasters to expand local broadcast programming significantly.