Broadcast in the context of Cable television

A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.

Communicating an information signal across distance requires some form of pathway or medium. These pathways, called communication channels, use two types of media: Transmission line-based telecommunications cable (e.g. twisted-pair, coaxial, and fiber-optic cable) and broadcast (e.g. microwave, satellite, radio, and infrared).

To disseminate (from lat. disseminare "scattering seeds"), in the field of communication, is to broadcast a message to the public without direct feedback from the audience.

Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works either streamed online, or distributed as video tapes, or on DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying live or recorded images and sounds.

Video art is named for the original analog video tape, which was the most commonly used recording technology in much of the form's history into the 1990s. With the advent of digital recording equipment, many artists began to explore digital technology as a new way of expression. Video art does not necessarily rely on the conventions that define theatrical cinema. It may not use actors, may contain no dialogue, and may have no discernible narrative or plot. Video art also differs from cinema subcategories such as avant garde cinema, short films, and experimental film.

A broadcast network (sometimes called a terrestrial network) is a group of radio stations, television stations, or other electronic media outlets, that form an agreement to air, or broadcast, content from a centralized source. For example, ABCTooltip American Broadcasting Company, CBSTooltip CBS and NBCTooltip NBC (U.S.), CBC/Radio-CanadaTooltip Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada), the BBC (UK), the ABCTooltip Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia), ARD (Germany), PTVTooltip People's Television Network and IBCTooltip Intercontinental Broadcasting Corporation (Philippines), KBSTooltip Korean Broadcasting System (South Korea), and NHK (Japan) are TV networks that provide programming for local terrestrial television station affiliates to air using signals that can be picked up by the home television sets of local viewers. Networks generally, but not always, operate on a national scale; that is, they cover an entire country.

Streaming media, Internet radio, and webcasting are sometimes considered forms of broadcasting despite the lack of terrestrial stations; its practitioners may also be called "broadcasters" or even "broadcast networks".

Broadcast journalism is the field of news and journals which are broadcast by electronic methods instead of the older methods, such as printed newspapers and posters. It works on radio (via air, cable, and Internet), television (via air, cable, and Internet) and the World Wide Web. Such media disperse pictures (static and moving), visual text and sounds.

The terms local programme, local programming, local content or local television refers to a television program made by a television station or independent television producer for broadcast only within the station's transmission area or television market. Local programmes can encompass the whole range of programme genres but will usually only cover subjects or people of particular interest to an audience within the station's coverage area.

For example, a local sports programme will present results, interviews and coverage of games or matches, just like a network sports programme, but it would only feature teams and players from within the broadcaster's transmission area.

A game show (or gameshow) is a genre of broadcast viewing entertainment where contestants compete in a game for rewards. The shows are typically directed by a host, who explains the rules of the program as well as commentating and narrating where necessary. The history of the game shows dates back to the late 1930s when both radio and television game shows were broadcast. The genre became popular in the United States in the 1950s, becoming a regular feature of daytime television.

For the purposes of this article, a traditional game show is defined as a radio, television or streaming contest in which prizes can be won within a single episode through objective completion of tasks and not through fan or contestant votes, additionally, contestants, television personalities or celebrities, sometimes as part of a team, play a game which involves answering trivia questions or solving puzzles, usually for prizes such as cash, trips and goods and services.

A first-preference is a voter's most-preferred candidate. In certain ranked systems such as first preference plurality, ranked-choice voting (RCV), and the single transferable vote, first preferences for a candidate are considered most important and prioritized heavily. This incentivizes pandering to the political base or "core support" as a result of the center squeeze effect. Methods like Condorcet voting, rated voting, and the Borda count do not exhibit such effects. Methods like anti-plurality voting and Coombs' method have the opposite effect, being dominated by a voter's bottom rankings and so tending to elect the "least offensive" candidates.

First-preference votes are used by psephologists and the print and broadcast media to broadly describe the state of the parties at elections and the swing between elections. The term is much-used in Australian politics, where ranked voting has been universal at federal, state, and local levels since the 1920s.

Satellite radio is defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)'s ITU Radio Regulations (RR) as a broadcasting-satellite service. The satellite's signals are broadcast nationwide, across a much wider geographical area than terrestrial radio stations, and the service is primarily intended for the occupants of motor vehicles. It is available by subscription, mostly commercial free, and offers subscribers more stations and a wider variety of programming options than terrestrial radio.

Satellite radio technology was inducted into the Space Foundation Space Technology Hall of Fame in 2002. Satellite radio uses the 2.3 GHz S band in North America for nationwide digital radio broadcasting. In other parts of the world, satellite radio uses the 1.4 GHz L band formerly allocated for DAB.

Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 79% of video industry developers as of December 2024. It supports a maximum resolution of 8K UHD.

The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (i.e., half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. This was achieved with features such as a reduced-complexity integer discrete cosine transform (integer DCT), variable block-size segmentation, and multi-picture inter-picture prediction. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems. The H.264 standard can be viewed as a "family of standards" composed of a number of different profiles, although its "High profile" is by far the most commonly used format. A specific decoder decodes at least one, but not necessarily all profiles. The standard describes the format of the encoded data and how the data is decoded, but it does not specify algorithms for encoding—that is left open as a matter for encoder designers to select for themselves, and a wide variety of encoding schemes have been developed. H.264 is typically used for lossy compression, although it is also possible to create truly lossless-coded regions within lossy-coded pictures or to support rare use cases for which the entire encoding is lossless.

Digital journalism, also known as netizen journalism or online journalism, is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet, as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast. What constitutes digital journalism is debated amongst scholars. However, the primary product of journalism, which is news and features on current affairs, is presented solely or in combination as text, audio, video, or some interactive forms like storytelling stories or newsgames and disseminated through digital media technology.

Fewer barriers to entry, lowered distribution costs and diverse computer networking technologies have led to the widespread practice of digital journalism. It has democratized the flow of information that was previously controlled by traditional media including newspapers, magazines, radio and television. In the context of digital journalism, online journalists are often expected to possess a wide range of skills, yet there is a significant gap between the perceived and actual performance of these skills, influenced by time pressures and resource allocation decisions.

Serial digital interface (SDI) is a family of digital video interfaces first standardized by SMPTE (The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) in 1989. For example, ITU-R BT.656 and SMPTE 259M define digital video interfaces used for broadcast-grade video. A related standard, known as high-definition serial digital interface (HD-SDI), is standardized in SMPTE 292M; this provides a nominal data rate of 1.485 Gbit/s.

Additional SDI standards have been introduced to support increasing video resolutions (HD, UHD and beyond), frame rates, stereoscopic (3D) video, and color depth. Dual link HD-SDI consists of a pair of SMPTE 292M links, standardized by SMPTE 372M in 1998; this provides a nominal 2.970 Gbit/s interface used in applications (such as digital cinema or HDTV 1080P) that require greater fidelity and resolution than standard HDTV can provide. 3G-SDI (standardized in SMPTE 424M) consists of a single 2.970 Gbit/s serial link that allows replacing dual link HD-SDI. 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI standards were published on March 19, 2015.

In packet switching networks, traffic flow, packet flow or network flow is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. RFC 2722 defines traffic flow as "an artificial logical equivalent to a call or connection." RFC 3697 defines traffic flow as "a sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast, or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow could consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection." Flow is also defined in RFC 3917 as "a set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval."Packet flow temporal efficiency can be affected by one-way delay (OWD) that is described as a combination of the following components:

• Processing delay (the time taken to process a packet in a network node)
• Queuing delay (the time a packet waits in a queue until it can be transmitted)
• Transmission delay (the amount of time necessary to push all the packet into the wire)
• Propagation delay (amount of time it takes the signal’s header to travel from the sender to the receiver)

An RF modulator (radio frequency modulator) is an electronic device used to convert signals from devices such as media players, VCRs and game consoles to a format that can be handled by a device designed to receive a modulated RF input, such as a radio or television receiver. Its input is a baseband signal, which is used to modulate a radio frequency source.

RF modulators operate on different channels depending on the region and have been integrated into various home electronics. However, they tend to produce lower image quality than a baseband connection due to losses during the modulation and demodulation process. In professional broadcast settings, more sophisticated modulators are used.