What's DVB-C?

DVB-C stands for Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable and it is the DVB European consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital television over cable. This system transmits an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 family digital audio/digital video stream, using a QAM modulation with channel coding. The standard was first published by the ETSI in 1994, and subsequently became the most widely used transmission system for digital cable television in Europe. It is deployed worldwide in systems ranging from the larger cable television networks (CATV) down to smaller satellite master antenna TV (SMATV) systems.
DVB-C2
On February 18, 2008 it was announced that a new standard – DVB-C2 – would be developed during 2008, and a "Call for Technologies" was issued Proposals including simulation programs and information on patent rights could be submitted until June 16, 2008.
"The results of the DVB-C2 Study Mission already provided clear indications that technologies are available allowing the performance of the second generation DVB cable transmission system to get so close to the theoretical Shannon Limit that any further improvements in the future would most likely not be able to justify the introduction of a disruptive third generation of cable transmission system." (DVB-C2 CfT)
By using state of the art coding and modulation techniques, DVB-C2 should offer greater than 30% higher spectrum efficiency under the same conditions, and the gains in downstream channel capacity will be greater than 60% for optimized HFC networks.
The final DVB-C2 specification was approved by the DVB Steering Board in April 2009.DVB-C2 allows bitrates up to 83.1 Mbit/s on a 8 MHz channel bandwidth when using 4096-QAM modulation; future extensions will allow up to 97 Mbit/s and 110.8 Mbit/s per channel using 16384-QAM and 65536-AQAM modulation.

DVB-C PCIe TV Tuner
DVB-C USB TV Tuner

	DVB-C	DVB-C2
Input Interface	Single Transport Stream (TS)	Multiple Transport Stream and Generic Stream Encapsulation (GSE)
Modes	Constant Coding & Modulation	Variable Coding & Modulation and Adaptive Coding & Modulation
FEC	Reed Solomon (RS)	LDPC + BCH
Interleaving	Bit-Interleaving	Bit- Time- and Frequency-Interleaving
Modulation	Single Carrier QAM	COFDM
Pilots	Not Applicable	Scattered[disambiguation needed] and Continual Pilots[disambiguation needed]
Guard Interval[disambiguation needed]	Not Applicable	1/64 or 1/128
Modulation Schemes[disambiguation needed]	16- to 256-QAM	16- to 4096-QAM