It is demonstrated how modulation schemes based on QPSK can be directly incorporated into QAM-based systems. It is argued that this leads directly to an easily implementable structure that is both efficient in bandwidth and data reliability. It is contended that the correct solution to the concatenated coding problem for HDTV transmission is to simply extend the modulation codes developed for QPSK-to-QAM modulation. In nonconcatenated situations, a trellis code based on a binary code at rate 2/3 is usually best. However, this is not the case for higher error rates at the output of the trellis decoder (e.g., when a symbol error correcting decoder follows as a concatenated code). The reason for this follows from an analysis of the effect of the number of nearest neighbors on the error rate. A four-way partition of QAM is a natural extension of QPSK modulation; it is a simple matter to incorporate any good QPSK code into a trellis coding scheme for QAM modulation. A concatenated coding scheme based on QPSK trellis codes and symbol error correcting coding is proposed. An example is presented to show the advantages of this approach.>