The Digital Hierarchy — A Blueprint for Television in the 21st Century
Glenn A. Reitmeier, Chester F.carlson〔, E.A. Geiger, Dietrich Westerkamp · SMPTE Journal · 1992
The establishment of a new standard for HDTV is an opportunity to create a technologically advanced standard that will serve current and future applications of video well into the next century. This article describes a digital approach that provides efficiency and flexibility through a hierarchical approach to data compression. The digital hierarchy concept is a novel approach to transcoding digital video among several data rates. Also described are some of the industry requirements that the authors believe will be important in the era of HDTV, and the ability of a digital hierarchy to satisfy them is evaluated.