The 1972 Dolphins. The 1995 Bulls. The 1998 Yankees. And now, the 2007 Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers. This year, the SCTE set a record for the approval of standards.
The SCTE Engineering Committee, a nine-member panel chaired by Charlie Kennamer of Comcast, approved 67 standards, a 34 percent increase compared with the previous record, which it set last year.
The most recent was SCTE 128 2007 – AVC Video Systems and Transport Constraints for Cable Television.
Developed by the SCTE Digital Video Subcommittee (DVS), the standard defines the video coding and transport constraints on joint document “ITU-T Recommendation H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 Advanced Video Codec” for applications in cable-system carriage of broadcast and linear programming.
The committee provided a translation in English: the new standard describes the transmission of AVC-coded digital video in MPEG transport streams. AVC is a more efficient coding scheme than the currently used MPEG-2 standard and uses less bandwidth, resulting in greater network capacity.
SCTE 128 2007 is available for download at the SCTE’s web site, along with complete details about the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-accredited SCTE Standards Program.