What is the relationship between NTSC, ATSC, and MPEG?

Answer 1

MPEG means "Motion Picture Experts Group', the industry-established group that designed the methods for compression of moving-picture images.

NTSC and ATSC set official standards for television broadcasting in the US. Broadcasters must abide by these, but closed-systems (cable, satellite) do not have to. ATSC has defined the standards for digital broadcast TV (including HDTV), and that standard includes MPEG2 compression as well as Dolby Digital compression for sound.

Answer 2

NTSC National Television Standards Comittee

A group of scientists, engineers, and broadcasters who got together in the early 1950s to lay out how color TV should work (to be compatible with existing black-and-white TV for one thing). For a comittee, what they did was almost miraculous (to get that many people to agree).

What we watched from the early 50's even until now on over-the-air TV is the NTSC standard for broadcasting (I'm not talking about the shows/content, I'm talking about the details about how TVs work inside, and how TV station transmitters work).

NTSC might also be called "analog" TV.

MPEG is a compression method for digital TV. It has nothing to do with transmitters and the inside workings of a TV. It can be a software program running on a microprocessor that does the compressing and de-compressing of the TV information, or the compression can be done in logic ICs.

Compression is taking information (what the TV camera "sees") and removing some of the information to cause it to take up less space, less time to transmit, or less bandwidth, but not removing so much information that your eye still sees everything it is supposed to see. In otherwords the picture on your TV screen still looks like it should.

ATSC is Advanced Television Standards comittee. This is a relatively new comittee of scientists, engineers, and broadcasters that are setting standards for the new HDTV and digital TV formats.

One or some of the digital TV formats might require the use of MPEG compression/decompression as part of the overall standard.

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