Cable TV systems can still transmit analog signals so how does the change affect university TV systems? If the university TV system has off the air receivers to get local programming channels, the off the air receiver must be replaced or upgraded to digital capability.

You can fit 6 to 15 compressed digital TV channels into the same space as 1 analog TV channel. This means that are school TV system that has 70 channels could offer 500 to 1000 digital TV channels. Of course this means that the head end system would need to change and each user would need a set top box that could convert the digital TV signal back into a form that can be displayed on a television. Not all digital compression methods are the same. The most used video compression used by television broadcasters in 2009 is MPEG. There are several versions of MPEG which include MPEG-2, MPEG-4. MPEG 2 offers approximately 50:1 compression and MPEG-4 (the AVC version) offers approximately 100:1 compression. Another popular form of video compression used in TV systems is the Microsoft VC-1 compression. VC-1 compression offers approximately the same performance at MPEG-4.