Future developments of the NICAM 728 system

There is much potential for the future development of the NICAM 728 system. The system could easily be adapted to work both with other terrestrial television transmission systems and PAL-based DBS services. The data transmission capabilities of the existing baseband coding specification have yet to be fully explored. Two areas, where significant benefits could be gained in the future, are in the development of options for multichannel sound channels, suitable for enhance television services and the introduction of conditional access scrambling. These would require new baseband coding options to be specified for the NICAM system which would, necessarily, be incompatible with existing decoder circuits. Therefore, if such coding options are developed, they will require a new generations of decoder circuits capable of dealing with both the existing and the new baseband coding options. As extensions to the existing system specification, any new coding options should, if possible, form the basis of internationally agreed specifications