Digital Television has been the latest buzz word for a few years now but many people don’t know what it is or what it means for TV in the future.

Digital television is like a new format of television transmission. Traditionally all TV’s used an analogue format of TV transmission, it didn’t matter if your were in the USA and using a NTSC set or in Australia using a PAL standard set it was all analogue.

Introducing digital television solves a few problems associated with analogue TV and also opens up a few extra marketing opportunities for broadcasters, equipment manufacturers and governments.

Analogue TV’s limitations are starting to show their age as more and more broadcasters want to transmit, it is getting difficult to allow them to set up new transmitters in some countries and not have their transmitter interfere with one from a neighboring town. Allegedly digital TV transmission doesn’t have these problems like analogue had, also with digital TV the video information is compressed so in the bandwidth space it took to transmit one channel before you can now transmit several channels.

With all these extra channels broadcasters can now transmit a lot more stuff like TV guides, extra programming multiple sport views and high definition programming, thus giving the TV stations more advertising revenue and the user more choice.

Not every country has committed to digital TV yet and just like the days of analogue TV there seems that no country can agree on a standard system with Europe adopting a system known as DVB, the US using the ATSC system and Japan using the ISDB system.

All these systems are capable of both standard and high definition pictures, standard definition is rated at around 640 by 480 pixels where high definition is more like 1920 × 1080 or so. Standard definition is often compared to DVD quality, this is a pretty good comparison as its around the same size picture and the technology used to encode and the image into digital is pretty much the same as what DVD uses.

Some countries are proposing the total phase our of analogue TV altogether, while digital set top boxes can be purchased reasonably cheap to keep your old analogue set going, the idea is pretty impractical for the millions of hand held sets around the world.