ted to, and dependent on, the bit rate or payload of the compressed signal. Higher bit rate payloads result from less com- pression and its effect on picture quality and sound fidelity. Another consideration is amount of detail in the source material. For example, digitized source material can be achieved with ITU-R BT601, and contains far more detail than the same material after it has been encoded for National Television Systems Committee (NTSC), Phase Alternate Line (PAL), or Sequentiel Couleur Avec Memorie (SECAM) transmission. These processes include filtering to limit the amount of high frequency detail in order to reduce the level of interference with the color subcarrier. It makes little or no sense to compress analog signals into payloads greater than approxi- mately 10 Mbs because there is very little or no detail left in the video signal after it has been filtered and passed through the encoding process. If the detailed picture information doesn't exist, it can't be compressed and passed on. Higher bitrate sampling and encoding results in unnecessarily higher bandwidth (more bits) in the commu- nications channel (unnecessary cost) and any noise or artifacts gener- ated degrades picture quality. PRACTICAL IP AND TELECOM FOR BROADCAST ENGINEERING AND OPERATIONS On the other hand, compress the same material beyond approximately 8 Mbs and quality goes to pot quickly, as evident from loss of detail and increase in noise, and artifacts will show. Not coincidentally, many broadcasters and cable programmers have adopted 8 Mbs pay- load as their standard for content delivery applications, which seems to be a reasonable digital equivalent to analog broadcast quality. Yet another side of this complex picture is the possibility of realizing equivalent quality from compressing BT601 digital material that has not been subjected to NTSC, PAL, or SECAM encoding, to 4 to 6 Mbs payloads. Results will vary because of different approaches to prod- uct implementation and system configuration. Facing the reality that pictur