Television broadcast standards vary from country to country. Explore Xceive's broadcast standards knowledge base below to locate the broadcast standard in any given location. You can find info by country on many standards, including cable, terrestrial, digital and high-definition TV.
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About Digital TV

Digital TV (DTV) is an entirely new television system that will ultimately replace the existing analog system. The term "DTV" refers to a broadcast system for transmitting, receiving, and displaying digital images. DTV stations broadcast pictures and audio as digital “packets,” or bursts of data.

There are three digital TV transmission standards in the world today:

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With digital television, broadcasters are able to offer free, over-the-air television with higher resolution and better picture quality than is possible under the current analog mode of TV transmission.

DTV programs can be transmitted either as standard-definition television (SDTV), or high-definition television (HDTV). SDTV programs are broadcast as 480-line interlaced (480i) or progressive-scan (480p) video. HDTV programs are broadcast either in the 1080-line interlaced (1080i) or 720-line progressive (720p) formats, always with a wide screen picture. Both formats have much higher picture quality than normal SDTV.

All three digital television transmitting systems use the same algorithm used in DVDs to encode the image, MPEG-2. These three standards vary mainly in the video format before and after the encoding, and the way the audio is encoded.

Some broadcasters can offer HDTV-television with theater-quality pictures and CD-quality sound.

 

 


Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a suite of internationally accepted, open standards for digital television maintained by the DVB Project, an industry consortium with more than 270 members, and published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

DVB is used throughout Europe, Australia, South Africa and India or is at least planned for. DVB is also the standard for cable and satellite in most Asian, African and many South American countries.
The various DVB systems are:
* satellite (DVB-S and DVB-S2)
* cable (DVB-C)
* terrestrial television (DVB-T)
* terrestrial television for handhelds (DVB-H)

 

 


The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) is the group that helped to develop the new digital television standard for the United States, which has also adopted by Canada, Mexico, and South Korea.

The ATSC system supports a host of different display resolutions and frame rates.

 

 


Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) is a digital television (DTV) and digital audio broadcasting (DAB) format unique only to Japan. It was created to allow radio and television stations there to convert to digital. Japan started development of the digital system in the 1980's and began terrestrial digital broadcasting in 2003. ISDB-T operates on unused TV channels, an approach taken by other countries.