Chapter 8 - Digital Television (DTV)

Abstract

Digital television (DTV) is made up of several different international broadcast standards, such as ATSC, OpenCable, DVB, and ISDB. This chapter provides the information and a comparison of their features. The ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) DTV broadcast standard is used in the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and Argentina. The ATSC standard is actually a group of standards: A/52 Digital Audio Compression (AC-3 and E-AC-3) Standard, A/53(ATSC Digital Television Standard), A/57 (Content Identification and Labeling for ATSC Transport), and A/64 Transmission Measurement and Compliance for Digital Television. The three other primary DTV standards are DVB (Digital Video Broadcast), ISDB (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting), and OpenCable™. The basic audio and video capabilities are very similar. The major differences are the RF modulation schemes and the level of definition for non-audio/video services. QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) is a method of encoding digital data onto a carrier for RF transmission. It is typically used for cable transmission of DTV signals. The ISDB digital television (DTV) broadcast standard is used in Japan. It uses an MPEG-2 transport stream to convey compressed digital video, compressed digital audio, and data. Like DVB, this transport stream is then transmitted either via terrestrial, cable, or satellite. Interactive applications are based on BML (Broadcast Mark-up Language).