Are You Ready for Digital TV?
Digital TV will deliver movie-quality picture and sound, more free over-the-air channels and new interactive services, and will free up valuable signal space for public safety communications and wireless broadband Internet services.
The transition to digital TV will be complete on February 17, 2009, when all TV stations in the country will sign off their old “analog” transmitters for the last time. Depending on how you receive TV, you may have to take action to continue watching your favorite stations after the transition to digital TV is complete. If you have cable, satellite or IPTV, you probably won’t need to do anything. If you watch your television with an outdoor or “rabbit ears” antenna, you may need a new TV or a special converter box. You can even get a coupon for the box so it will cost you either very little or no money at all.
What is Digital TV?
In digital television, the picture and sound are converted from varying waves into computer code – a stream of ones and zeroes. Sending TV signals as digital information has several advantages over traditional transmission. With digital TV, you can improve the quality of the picture, send more programs and send more information along with the television programming.
Digital signals take less “space,” which means that a broadcaster can improve the quality of the images being sent or can send more programs using the same amount of space. With digital TV, broadcasters will be able to send a signal with picture and sound quality approaching what you would experience in a movie theater. Or, a station could broadcast multiple lower quality signals (multicasting) in the same space required for one traditional channel.
Another advantage of digital TV is that it doesn’t lose quality over distance as quickly as a traditional signal. This means that static, ghosting and other forms of interference common in today’s television will not affect digital television broadcasts.
Finally, other pieces of digital information can be integrated into the television signal, making it interactive. Just imagine what you might be able to do with interactive, digital TV. You could:
-Get the recipes and shopping lists from yourfavorite cooking show
-Play educational games while watching children’s programming
-Learn more about an actor or answer trivia questions during a movie
-Affect the outcome of a reality series with real-time voting—No more waiting until the end of a show like American Idol to cast your vote!
These are just some of the possibilities in a digital television future! For these and other reasons, digital TV is the biggest technical innovation in television history – even bigger than when TV went to color in the 1950s. In the ‘50s, to see color TV, you had to buy a color TV set. To see digital TV, you have a number of options. Some of these options require you to purchase equipment—some don’t.
Stay tuned for the next article in this series: What Do I Need to do to “Go Digital”? But if you can’t wait, visit one of these Web sites to learn more about the exciting future of television:
http://www.dtv.gov
http://www.dtvtransition.org
http://www.dtvanswers.com