One of the key aspects of digital broadcast television is the need to compress the digital video to reduce the transmission bandwidth requirement. Numerous video coding standards have been defined with properties that depend upon the targeted application. For example, H.263 is primarily designed for low bit-rate applications, and MPEG-II is used for applications where quality is the most important aspect. These coding standards are primarily models for how to efficiently code video. They, in general, do not consider how the coded video is broadcast, and how the compressed video bitstream responds to transmission errors. In this thesis, the properties of the MPEG-II coding standard are investigated (although many of the results are extensible to the other frequency transform based video codecs).