GI First to be Evaluated

Dallas, TX, May 8, 1995—Digital video system conformance testing has begun at the Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs) facilities in Louisville, Colorado. The tests will help to verify the compatibility and interoperability of different vendors' compressed digital bitstreams and decoders.

The CableLabs Board of Directors approved a plan for the advanced phases of this conformance testing last December.

The bulk of work since then has been in creating the computer software and hardware configurations that will be employed in this testing, said CableLabs Vice President of Engineering Dr. Rich Prodan.

We have received great cooperation from General Instrument and after testing theirbitstreams, I can say that the results have been most beneficial both to GI and to CableLabs," Prodan said.

Currently, half of some 104 system transport stream elements and 75 percent of some 71 video stream elements are verified in the tested bitstreams.The video parameters are checked to comply with the main profile at main level definition.

Preliminary tests have been conducted on several GI bitstreams and CableLabs has verified many of the above mentioned syntactic and semantic elements.A suite of encoded bitstreams will be compiled for more extensive testing presently being defined.

CableLabs President and CEO Dr. Richard R. Green said that the CableLabs focus on interoperability of digital equipment and digital bitstreams remains atop the Lab's priority list."CableLabs will be willing to address these issues of functional commonality in collaboration with any interested industry vendors," Green said.

The conformance project has benefited from the creation of a world class digital test facility to serve as an international venue for evaluating and verifying bitstreams and decoders to determine interoperability for digital video compression on cable.

Tests are being performed on MPEG2 transport streams at the system layer level using a common, agreed upon interface in order to test the video, audio, 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 and www.ebif.tv.

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.