set-top box

A small computing device that interfaces a television (TV) set or computer to a cable TV (CATV) network, cable modem network, or satellite TV dish and, perhaps, telephone network. A set-top box is responsible for functions such as decoding digital TV signals for display on an analog TV set, compression and decompression, buffering, security management, and various signaling and control communications. See also analog, buffer, cable modem, CATV, compression, digital, encoding, security, and signaling and control.