A system and method are disclosed for providing a unified video data stream for diverse receiving platforms. In some embodiments, the unified data stream can provide video data to multiple receiving devices with diverse video data input requirements. The communication system can include a digitizer that converts an analog video to a high resolution (HR) digital video signal. The communication system can also include a signal processing engine that receives the HR digital video signal, compress the video signal, creates video packets from the compressed signal, and identifies at least a portion of the video packets for distribution to lower resolution devices. The HR data stream can be sent to high resolution devices wherein the identified packets can be “copied” from the HR data stream and sent to devices having lower resolution requirements.