__exclusive__ — Mpeg2

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, countries began transitioning from analog to digital terrestrial television. MPEG2 was the mandatory codec for DVB (Europe) and ATSC (North America). Your local TV station broadcast "The Tonight Show" or "60 Minutes" over the air using an MPEG2 transport stream (.ts files). Because of this, MPEG2 became synonymous with "broadcast quality."

To understand the importance of MPEG-2, one must look back at the state of media in the early 1990s. The world was transitioning from analog to digital, but there was a massive hurdle: bandwidth. An uncompressed standard-definition video signal required roughly 270 Mbps of data. This was impossible to transmit over satellite, cable, or the nascent internet, and it would fill a hard drive in minutes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, countries

Technically known as H.222/H.262, the standard was a quantum leap forward from its predecessor, MPEG-1. While MPEG-1 was designed primarily for compact discs (CDs) and aimed for non-interlaced video at lower bitrates, MPEG-2 was engineered for broadcast-grade quality. It supported interlaced video (the standard for analog TVs of the time), higher bitrates, and a scalability that allowed it to handle everything from standard-definition news broadcasts to high-definition Hollywood films. Because of this, MPEG2 became synonymous with "broadcast