Anaheim, CA, Nov. 29, 1994—The Board of Directors of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs) today approved a plan for the advanced phases of digital video system conformance testing to verify the compatibility and interoperability of different vendors' compressed digital bitstreams and decoders.

The digital video system conformance project is a high priority with the cable television industry, and will provide critical information to CableLabs member companies and to equipment manufacturers. With the board approval, CableLabs will begin evaluating certain companies' baseband digital bitstreams in the Louisville, Colorado-based laboratories.

"Interoperability of digital equipment and digital bitstreams remains of paramount importance to the cable industry," said Dr. Richard R. Green, president and CEO of CableLabs. This type of testing is critical to the overall work plan of CableLabs and is central to its mission, Green added.

"CableLabs looks forward to addressing these issues of functional commonality in collaboration with its members and with industry vendors," Green said. "Digital compression is a keystone of future networks, and interoperability of different formats is basic to allowing the information superhighway to be finalized and to flourish," he added.

Specifically, the project contemplates the utilization of the CableLabs' laboratory facilities in Louisville, Colo., as an international venue to evaluate and verify bitstreams and decoders to determine their interoperability of digital bitstreams. Tests would be performed on MPEG2 transport streams at the system layer level using a common, agreed upon interface in order to test the video, audio and data synchronization and multiplexing (not just elementary bitstreams such as compressed video alone.)

CableLabs is a research and development consortium of cable television system operators representing more than 85% of the cable subscribers in the United States, 70% of the subscribers in Canada, and 5-10% of cable subscribers in Mexico. CableLabs plans and funds research and development projects that will help cable companies take advantage of future opportunities and meet future challenges in the television industry. It also transfers relevant technologies to member companies and to the industry. In addition, CableLabs acts as a clearinghouse to provide information on current and prospective technological developments that are of interest to the cable industry.

About CableLabs: Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry. A non-profit research and development consortium, CableLabs delivers innovations that enable cable operators to be the providers of choice in their markets. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org.

CableLabs® is a registered trademark of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. Other CableLabs marks are listed at http://www.cablelabs.com/certqual/trademarks. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.