Digital versus analogue television
Television signals used to be recorded in an analogue format. That simply means the signal could be of any value from 0 to 1 volt.
Whenever you pass an electronic signal down a wire, through a connector, into another machine, recorded onto tape, etc., it loses some quality – the signal becomes slightly distorted, and It is impossible for the receiving machine to work out exactly what the original signal looked like.
Once a tape had been copied a few times, that quality loss (generation loss) became apparent, so we tried not to copy tapes too often.
Ones and zeros
The other way of sending a signal is to take thousands of measurements, and send a series of binary numbers down a cable. So, if at a particular time ...
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