MONTREUX, Switzerland Ø The U.S.-developed digital TV system is steadily losing influence in the global market, as more and more countries back the European-designed Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standard. Even some current subscribers to the U.S. Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standard are considering defecting to DVB.
Momentum toward the DVB standard was apparent at the World Television Forum Montreux 2000, an international conference for engineering executives and broadcasting and technology industry management, which concluded here on Sunday (June 4). The Forum also drew regulators from a number of countries.
According to an international update on digital broadcasting held at the conference, Australia Ø which had earlier reversed its support for ATSCØ spent much of last year preparing for a DVB-based digital TV rollout on Jan. 1, 2001. Having conducted a number of tests in recent months, "We're more and more convinced that the DVB was the right answer," said David Soothill, director of communications and planning at SBS Corp., one of two government-funded public broadcasters in Australia.
Brazil, slated for a DTV launch in the first quarter of 2001, is expecting "the official announcement on its decision on a digital TV system in July or August," according to Fernando Bittencourt, director of engineering at GloboTV. Brazil's Society of TV engineers and the Brazilian association of radio and television broadcasting stations, which were authorized by the National Telecommunication Regulatory Agency in Brazil to conduct DTV tests, have already sent their final report to the Agency, he added. The test report, the preliminary results of which caused a major stir when they were shared at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in April, concluded that Brazil should drop the 8VSB standard of ATSC and suggested that "the digital TV system to be adopted in Brazil must use the [DVB] COFDM modulation." Either Japan's ISDB or Europe's DVB standard could be chosen, Bittencourt said.
Meanwhile, Argentina, which formally adopted the ATSC standard in 1998, is reconsidering its decision. According to local newspaper reports, Argentina's communications secretary, Henoch Aguiar, was quoted as saying that the previous resolution on DTV standard "is null and void." His statement was based largely on the fact that the choice of the ATSC standard was made without tests, without any coordination with Brazil, and was based on some false considerations of the European standard DVB, Aguiar reportedly said.
ATSC chairman Robert Graves, who attended the conference here, confirmed the Argentina news reports but downplayed their implications. They do not mean that Argentina will automatically adopt DVB, he said. "They are not that stupid," he said. He implied that Argentina's decision has a lot to do with a recent change in government, rather than with technical issues associated with the ATSC standard. Graves said that the ATSC will continue to work with Argentina, and will support its decision making process.
To date, aside from the United States, only Canada, South Korea and Taiwan remain committed to ATSC. And although nothing is set in stone yet in Mexico, Graves said it is "highly likely" that the country will join the U.S. ATSC camp.
Meanwhile in Europe, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Spain have already rolled out DVB-based digital TV broadcasting.
A race to sign up more countries to support one DTV standard over another is important, said Graves, primarily for economic reasons. The greater the market, the more equipment that's compliant with a particular standard will become available on the mass market, thus achieving a desired economy of scale, he explained.
Reports on the trials and rollout of DTV broadcasting services in various countries have had a significant impact on plans for DTV implementation in the rest of the world. Many conference attendees repeatedly expressed their concern and interest."We are watching very carefully how the ATSC system succeeds on the U.S. market," one said.
That assessment is still hard to make, even in the United States. In fact, Maximum Service TV, a Washington-based group representing local TV stations, is launching yet another set of DTV tests, even as concerns grow among U.S. broadcasters and regulators about the performance of ATSC's 8VSB standard and the lack of an unbiased engineering analysis of DTV test data.
Meanwhile, the Australians, who claimed to have done their homework, appear very pleased with the findings of a number of tests carried out last year. The Australians found that "the DVB COFDM modulation scheme works much better than expected," said SBS' Soothill. "A suite of additional tools and features of the DVB system also seem to run more smoothly." The Single Frequency Network works well and the impulse noise Ø often criticized by the ATSC camp as COFDM's weakness Ø "was not as bad as people might have thought," he said. "But that's probably because we use 8k COFDM rather than 2k."
Even the COFDM's coverage, which is also pointed out by ATSC proponents as another limitation of DVB, is passing muster, Soothill said. "We are achieving mostly slightly better coverage than previously predicted," he said.
But different countries implement their DTV broadcasting policies in vastly different ways, and each tends to have its own peculiar quirks and glitches. In Australia, for example, the government is not allowing multi-channel broadcasting in principle, except for a few sporting events. The government also mandates terrestrial broadcasters to offer 20 hours of HDTV broadcasting per week by the end of the first year of DTV broadcasts. The most peculiar feature, however, is the Australian government's pursuit of a triple-cast model, which would require terrestrial TV broadcasters to simulcast a program in three modes: the current analog PAL, HDTV and standard definition TV (SDTV). More specifically, whenever broadcasters decide to offer HDTV programs, they are also required to carry the same program in SDTV mode. The purpose of the policy appears to be the government 's wish to make a program available on SDTV to those who cannot afford an HDTV set .
In contrast, the ATSC digital TV sets sold in the United States are designed to decode all 18 high-definition and standard-definition formats, which will allow the sets to downconvert HD programs to SD. Speaking of the apparently inefficient use of the bandwidth in Australia, Graves said, "If there were a bit police in the world, the Australian government would be the first to be arrested."
The fact that the Australians are keen on HDTV broadcasting also puts them in an awkward situation among nations that have adopted the DVB standard. At this time, no European countries that have launched DTV service are offering an HDTV option. Graves noted that if Mexico joins the ATSC camp, "We will have a 500 million population market for ATSC-compliant digital TV receivers." But consumer electronics manufacturers will need to develop and manufacture an Australian-flavored DVB-based digital TV receiver for a population of 18 million, Graves said. This huge difference in economies of scale could have a big impact on TV set manufacturers and on consumers, he said.
To speed up the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SBS' Soothill speculated, the Australian government "may have to revise some of their decisions on DTV."
