Dig-Music: An on Demand Digital Musical Selection System Utilizing CATV Facilities

The extension of CATV facilities to every urban community and most rural communities of more than a few hundred households coupled with the increased channel capacity of these CATV facilities will result in a severe "software" shortage. There is a proliferation of new services being offered and in the planning stage, both "free" and subscriber based, but it is unlikely that these services will effectively utilize the total capacity of the newer systems which provide a bandwidth of 400 Mhz and higher. This paper describes Dig-Music, a proposed service which provides musical and voice offerings to subscribers on demand, a specialized service which would effectively utilize one or more channels. The selections are stored in digital form at the head-end of CATV systems and are transmitted to the subscriber on request. The major challenge associated with such a system is that high quality music reproduction from digital data requires a minimum of one- half million bits/second (1) assuming no compression.