ovidiu ceorchelea

What Does Headend Mean?
A headend is a facility that accepts TV signals as input from satellites, processes them into cable-quality signals, and then distributes them to homes and cable networks. It can be considered as the master distribution center where incoming television signals are received, selected, amplified and re-modulated, and sent for transmission to cable networks. 
Usually consists of an integrated receiver/decoder, off-air receivers, encoders, transcoders, rate shaper, channel modulators, channel processors and channel signal. An integrated receiver/decoder combines the functionalities of multiple receivers, decoding and decrypting into one unit. In most cases signals are sent downstream to the users, however, in rare cases, they are also received as upstream.