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To: Sector Investor who wrote (196)	2/10/1999 9:13:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 626

Sector Investor, I'll try to get better granularity at some point. One of my partners (my brother, Joseph) worked on the Philips HDTV inititive, and we've never seen eye to eye on some of the short-distance ANSI/EIA/TIA standards which defined studio quality vs commercial National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) quality, and how they translated to long distance transport bit-rate requirements. It's always been my contention that short haul EIA Standard EIA-250A/B/C required a higher resolution than, say, NTSC over the airways. The range of speeds, on the low end begings at 90 Mbps (slightly compressed through a codec), up through the ranges I previously spoke about. 90 Mb/s equates to two (2) T3s, while today's more popular codecs used to transport near-NTSC quality over distances are only one (1) T3 in width at ~45 Mb/s. Some vendors (many of them, in fact) claim that their T3 codecs actually meet NTSC. From the looks of these calculations, it would appear that the feeds they were using may have been the 90 Mb/s variant, with an additional overhead of some 10% to 20% for gaurd-band, management and "head room." But that may just be a reflection of my linear thinking along these lines, as I really don't know how they actually arrange their streams, yet. When these signals have been packaged for delivery over cable, MPEG encoding techniques are used. They are further reduced at this point to sub-10 Mb/s rates, typically ~1.5, ~2.0 to ~6 Mb/s. Note: these data rates very conveniently map to T1, E1 and T2 framing formats, respectively. The actual rates used are often determined by the nature of the content being sent. Sporting events take higher rates 6.3 Mb/s) than do, say, talking head shows like the evening News (which could get away with 2.0 Mb/s if necessary, depending on the b-w budget. Some adapt dynamically within those ranges. Anyway, I'm glad for both our sakes, as well as that of SR's, that I was able to at least clarify if not reduce the cloud of speculation over the legitimacy of their stated demo model. Regards, Frank C.