television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

, A-MAC carries digital information: sound, and data-teletext on an FM subcarrier at 7 MHz. Since the vision bandwidth of a standard MAC signal is 8.4 MHz, the horizontal resolution on A-MAC has to be reduced to make room for the 7 MHz carrier. ''A-MAC has not been used in service.''

Technical details

MAC transmits luminance and chrominance data separately in time rather than separately in frequency (as other analog television formats do, such as composite video). Audio and Scrambling (selective access) * Audio, in a format similar to

NICAM Near Instantaneous Companded Audio Multiplex (NICAM) is an early form of lossy compression for digital audio. It was originally developed in the early 1970s for point-to-point links within broadcasting networks.Croll, M.G., Osborne, D.W. and Spi ...

was transmitted digitally rather than as an FM subcarrier. * The MAC standard included a standard scrambling system, EuroCrypt, a precursor to the standard DVB-CSA encryption system.

TV transmission systems

Analog high-definition television systems Analog high-definition television has referred to a variety of analog video broadcast television systems with various display resolutions throughout history. Pre-1940 On 2 November 1936 the BBC began transmitting the world's first public regul ...

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

, what MAC technology tried to replace *

SECAM SECAM, also written SÉCAM (, ''Séquentiel de couleur à mémoire'', French for ''color sequential with memory''), is an analog color television system that was used in France, some parts of Europe and Africa, and Russia. It was one of th ...

, what MAC technology tried to replace * A-MAC *

B-MAC B-MAC is a form of analog video encoding, specifically a type of Multiplexed Analogue Components (MAC) encoding. MAC encoding was designed in the mid 80s for use with Direct Broadcast Satellite systems. Other analog video encoding systems inclu ...

C-MAC C-MAC is the television technology variant approved by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for satellite transmissions. The digital information is modulated using 2-4PSK ( phase-shift keying), a variation of quadrature PSK where only two of t ...

D-MAC Among the family of MAC or Multiplexed Analogue Components systems for television broadcasting, D-MAC is a reduced bandwidth variant designed for transmission down cable. * The data is Bipolar encoding, duobinary coded with a data burst rate of ...

E-MAC C-MAC is the television technology variant approved by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) for satellite transmissions. The digital information is modulated using 2-4PSK ( phase-shift keying), a variation of quadrature PSK where only two of t ...

* S-MAC *

D2-MAC D2-MAC is a satellite television transmission standard, a member of Multiplexed Analogue Components family. It was created to solve D-MAC's bandwidth problem on European cable systems. * D2-MAC uses half the data rate of D-MAC * D2-MAC has a re ...

HD-MAC HD-MAC (High Definition Multiplexed Analogue Components) was a broadcast television standard proposed by the European Commission in 1986, as part of Eureka 95 project. It belongs to the MAC - Multiplexed Analogue Components standard family. It is ...

, an early high-definition television standard allowing for 2048x1152 resolution. * DVB-S, MAC technology was replaced by this standard *

DVB-T DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in Febr ...

, MAC technology was replaced by this standard

External links

Multiplexed Analogue Components
in "Analog TV Broadcast Systems" by Paul Schlyter Video formats Television technology {{tv-tech-stub