166 Satellite Newsgathering This is the same as sending uncompressed video ­ it could be more expensive to sell because you would either use more bandwidth on the satellite (probably at an uneconomic price), maybe such an amount of bandwidth is not even available, or you would have to send it over a fiber-optic route, which might not be available everywhere. But if we go back to the original process of producing the freshly squeezed juice, we can see that the process began with squeezing oranges to produce the juice, of which the major constituent is water. The water is removed to produce a concentrate that can be put into a small carton and transported to the shop for sale. The customer buys the orange juice concentrate, takes it home and reconstitutes the orange juice by adding water back in. Effectively, the orange juice is `compressed' (just like the signal), so that a com- paratively large volume can be transported in a small carton (or bandwidth), and then the juice is reformed by adding the equivalent volume of water back in that was removed in the first place (decompressed). What is the advantage of this to the consumer? The cost of the orange juice concentrate is much less than the freshly squeezed juice and is therefore much more affordable, and the juice can be transported to just about anywhere without being degraded. `Ah, but it doesn't taste the same as freshly squeezed juice' ­ and that inevitably is the result of the compression processes we will be looking at. The signal at the end of the signal compression and decompression process is never the same as the original signal; something is lost along the way that cannot be regained, just as with the orange juice. However, it costs less in the end and is a reasonable facsimile of the original for most people. But there should never be any doubt or misunderstanding that a signal that has been compressed, transported and decompressed (reconstituted) can never be as good as the original uncompressed video and audio we started with.