Learn All About Digital TV – A Primer For Beginners
As of June, 2009 the United States required all television stations to move from analog tv transmission to digital tv transmission. The U. S. Was not the first to mandate this transmission nor will it be the last. Luxembourg and ten other European countries have already implemented the digital transition, while Japan will go all digital in 2011.
The law forcing U. S. Television stations to move from analog transmission to digital transmission was grounded primarily in its desire to make more bandwidth available to critical services like police and fire, and to improve television clarity, detail and sound. To a lesser extent, the government saw the possibility to generate revenue by auctioning off some of the spare bandwidth to the private sector.
To facilitate the conversion process the government addressed the need of those people who did not own a digital-ready television. It offered to those owners a coupon, worth up to forty dollars, which could be traded in for a digital converter box. Congress also stipulated that non-digital televisions could not be imported, nor could they be manufactured in the U. S. Retailers still selling analog television stock were required to prominently display at the point of sale a statement informing the customer that a converter box would be required for those sets.
The number of pixels displayed on the screen defines a television’s resolution. It is this attribute that provides the starkest contrast between analog and digital images. Whereas an analog image caps out at about 500 x 400 pixels(the number of discrete points on the screen), a digitally generated image can contain up to a whooping ten times that amount.
Multicasting is another advantage of digital television transmission. In an analog environment only one channel can be allocated to a chunk of bandwidth, whereas in a digital environment that same chunk can be divided into multiple channels. This provides television stations the opportunity to provide more programming to its viewers.
Interactive programming is another advantage of digital television. People subscribing to cable or satellite services will discover enhanced functionality. Example include movies-on-demand, text-messaging via the television’s remote to live television shows, and VCR-type choices such as pause, slow motion and fast forward.
In today’s digital television environment there are now four types of television available to the consumer. Analog televisions(which require converter boxes), digital-ready sets which have a digital converter(or tuner) but suffer from low resolution, HDTV-ready units which provide high resolution but may not have a converter, and an integrated HDTV set which provides high resolution and a tuner. Budget and personal preference play heavily into which choice is made.
Digital tv represents an exciting development in the history of television broadcast. Viewers can now reach new heights in picture detail and sound quality. And with its advanced viewing capabilities today and more on the way, the future of broadcasting will be nothing short of breathtaking.
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