General Instrument is the nation's top supplier of scrambling equipment used in satellite television systems, and a leading supplier of the set-top cable converters.

A V-chip installed in a television set or cable converter would read the signal; parents could program the chip to block out specific programs or whole channels.

Or one antenna input may be linked to a roof antenna and the other to a cable converter box.

Equipment sold in Japan used channel 1 or 2 (Channel 13-16 is for cable converters).

A digital VCR would be able to record the entire digital stream, and the viewer could play the movies back one a time through the cable converter.

A future product they might trail in - unless they work with American companies - is the cable converter that could well control the flow of information into the home.

The television set, or a cable converter in the consumer's home, would reconstruct the original information and combine it with the changed images.

Its principal products include hard drive enclosures, card readers, display adapters, video converters, and cable converters.

Analog television may be wireless or can require copper wire used by cable converters.

Microsoft, Intel and General Instruments are expected to announce that they are jointly developing a device that combines the cable converter and a personal computer.