Open architecture television receivers and extensible/intercompatible digital video representations

The authors propose that development of advanced television should take system architecture issues into account, and they outline continuing research toward non-pixel-based signal representations that decouple the spatial and temporal resolution of the program origination from that of the display and support scalability by channel bandwidth and processing power. It is shown that any attempt to formulate a single transmission, production, or display standard for the next generation of television which is simply an extrapolation of existing broadcast systems is unlikely to succeed. It is argued that a raster-scan standard with double the number of current lines runs the risk of being technologically obsolete even before it is widely adopted. It is concluded that the system architecture approach to future television provides an extensibility and flexibility that can be achieved in no other way.<>