Advent Of Digital Television Research Articles

Displays: From Fantasy to Reality in a Century

Although the Society’s formal involvement with television didn’t begin until 1950, it has kept pace with all of the advancements in display technology since then; from the earliest days of color television to the SMPTE-170M standards for CRT monitors in the 1980s, the advent of digital television and flat screen displays in the 1990s, and the 21st-century generation of Ultra HDTV displays with high dynamic range and wide color gamut capabilities.

Towards the application of interaction design to digital TV content development

Television can be considered one of the main means of mass entertainment. It occupies an important place in people's lives, influencing behavior and creating and/or enforcing consumer's habits and needs. With the advent of Digital Television, a series of new features tend to further impact upon society in many different ways. The main agent of this change is interactivity, which is the leverage that will transform the traditional viewer's role. Interactivity turns the viewer into a user, a partner who receives the content, but also produces, participates and collaborates during the viewing process. This paper aims to discuss the importance of applying interaction design in the development of projects related to digital television. The main factors that may contribute to improve the interaction design in applications for digital TV were identified drawing on a descriptive and qualitative method of investigation. The results showed that the interface design for this new media should not only be aesthetically appealing, but should also focus on usability (i.e. user's wishes and needs). Additionally, the creation of these interfaces requires the investigation of some characteristics and limitations of device interaction, considering the choice of colors, saturation levels and brightness, avoiding graphic symbols and prioritizing the navigation through the numerical buttons of the remote control.

Nursing Distance Education at the Dawn of Digital Broadcasting: A Case Study in Collaboration

For separate reasons, schools of nursing and public television stations are finding it a matter of mutual interest to work together in the production of distance education content for college nursing students in their communities. The advent of digital television (DTV) broadcasting has given these distance education partnerships new capabilities for reaching more potential students. In this article, I review one innovative collaboration between several nursing education programs and a public broadcasting service member station in South Texas. In this pilot project, nursing faculty were trained in television production techniques and became producers of DTV instructional video material. This case study demonstrates a number of ways in which nursing distance education programs can benefit by designing and delivering course material via digital broadcasting. It also highlights several difficulties that should be considered by distance educators prior to embarking on DTV curriculum development projects.

Data Broadcasting Solutions for Broadcasters

With the advent of digital television in the U.S. and worldwide, broadcasters are searching for new opportunities to enhance programming. In addition, many in the industry believe that potential new sources of revenue can be unlocked by providing consumers rich digital content. Recently Thomcast Communications and PBS teamed to test an end-to-end data broadcasting solution. This paper presents an update of those trials. First, a general data broadcasting architecture is discussed along with the technical requirements to support various potential business models. This includes a discussion on what is required to deliver IP content over MPEG-2 networks. Needs of both the network facility and the local station are addressed. Finally, solutions that have actually been implemented and tested in the field are presented.

The march of digital interactive TV and the emerging science of telegraphics

Programme viewing gives an accurate picture of the interests and aspirations of the viewing household. With the advent of digital television, viewers' programme-watching patterns can be tracked and analysed and the opportunity will be in place to build new targeting systems which go a stage further than today's geodemographic, lifestyle or psychographic tools. This paper examines the significance of the development of digital television in the world of marketing and direct marketing, and will discuss how the datasets can be combined to provide a new super-powerful targeting system, building on today's foundations, and applicable throughout the marketing mix.

Capacity Requirements of Video Servers in Broadcast Television Facilities

Digital video servers are rapidly being adopted in broadcast transmission facilities where new materials must be cached to these servers, usually from tape media or, possibly, from media in an archival system. To deal with the finite capacity of these servers (usually with hard disk media), old materials must be purged. In this process, materials of different time duration are handled. Increasingly, materials with different data rates are also handled because of the use of different compression standards, compression ratio, and (with the advent of digital television (DTV)) different uncompressed data rates and formats. Since the cost of video server storage is significant, understanding the time-dependent requirements of server storage capacity is important for system-level planning. A good understanding helps avoid wasteful provisioning of storage capacity without sacrificing operational flexibility. This paper presents a model that should be useful for planning or analyzing capacity requirements of video servers. Implications of the model for systems handling primarily long-form materials, such as near-video-on-demand (NVOD) applications will be examined.

Future demand for pay-TV in the UK

Abstract This article focuses on the prospects for pay-TV in the UK over the next 10 years. The major development on the horizon is the advent of digital television the introduction of which has the potential to significantly increase the demand for pay-TV services. This article examines some of the key issues and, with reference to both a bottom-up and top-down approach, provides projections of industry revenues and hardware penetration rates to the year 2005.