----- Original Message -----
From: "Brandon Butterworth" <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk>
On the financial side, it is trivial.
The opposite, the bits were paid for but unused back then so financially it was worth using them. In digital tv every bit has a use and so a cost, hence they are used for more TV channels instead for parasitic services. You end up competing with TV if you want any quantity so hard to make viable today.
On the engineering side, _impossible_.
The opposite, completely trivial now. Digital TV is a mux of a number of bit streams, some with compressed video others with meta data for epg, alternate sound, interactive apps etc. Adding another stream to the mux is trivial, you just have to pay for the bandwidth though as most are stat muxed it's possible to create room at the expense of the vbr streams where the video encoders reduce the quality of as result of back pressure from the stat muxer
And sanction means both "approve of" and "order the death of" and academic means both "very important learning-related" and "doesn't matter". His assertion, Brandon, had to do with *whether you can still slip it in without anyone noticing and having to do anything at any other stage of the transmission chain*, which was Stargate's Unique Selling Proposition. Yes, we know that its possible to move bits down a digital distribution channel, Captain Obvious. :-) Cheers, - jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274