Is there any advantage to broadcasting TV digitally?

Question

I don't see any advantage in digital signals if the TV is analog and has a converter box attached to receive the signal. I've also heard of the disadvantage that these signals drop off at about 35 miles.

Is it cheaper to transmit a signal digitally, as far as the cost of electricity? The only advantage I've heard about is the goernment selling off the now available TV bands for a lot of money.

Answer 1

It's about bandwidth, the amount of the frequency spectrum used.  A digital transmission, using the same amount of bandwidth as an analogue signal, can pack in many, many channels.  The customer thus has a lot more choice if using terrestrial TV.

The Government, once we all go to digital, will close the analogue transmissions and sell off the resulting redundant bandwidth off to companies like mobile phone networks.

So, you're right, as usual, it's all about money.

Answer 2

I think the overall idea is, that in time it will all be digital, so then you will no longer have that choise.

So now, it's just waiting for the official green lite, and then they will be starting to charge more that way,  as they always do

enjoy the pick you have now

Answer 3

Advantages of digital transmission is more information are can transmitted. You get more channels and sophisticated interactive services which cannot be done on analogue. Also information carried over digitally will be lossless. Either you get the signal or you don't -- unlike analogue where the picture quality can be in between. In today's world where the information medium is almost all in digital it makes sense to for any media go digital for compatiblity.

The people at the broadcast stations probably just double click a digit video file on their PCs which was digitally recorded on a digital camcorder. Meanwhile the people at home could digitally record a programme on a digital DVDR or digitally transmit the broadcast onto their PCs and digitally upload the file on YouTube. No translation is needed--they all speak the same "language".

Answer 4

In general you will get a higher quality picture.

more channels.

possibility of HD

No downside, since the converter is almost free.

Answer 5

One digital advantage I have heard of is that you can send several different broadcasts together on the same broadcast frequency. The listener with a HD radio can then choose which component broadcast they want to listen to. Maybe a different language, different program, etc.

Answer 6

whats the point in wearing clothes made THIS century!? jeez.

Answer 7

Very few displays are fully digital.  Even plasma and LCD displays, the pixel intensity is analog.  Only in DLP is the picture fully digital, both spatially and in intensity.  The improvement in picture quality from digital transmission has nothing to do with the display, although some displays take full advantage of the transmission and others do not.

From the transmission point of view, the advantages of digital transmission comes from the ability of digital signals to be immune to noise and degradation through the use of error-correction codes.  In addition, digital transmission allows the use of compression techniques to eliminate redundancy in the image, thus using less bandwidth than the analog signal.  From the political aspect, this latter is the main reason for the conversion to digital--less spectrum is used for TV, and the remainder can be sold by the government to make a lot of money.

However, the image improvements from digital transmission are immediately visible even on an ordinary analog TV: no noise  (snow) in the picture.   All analog transmission has snow, even in strong signal areas.  As the signal weakens, the snow gets worse.  For digital signals, nothing happens as the signal weakens until the error rate gets so high the  error correction can't keep up and the whole picture collapses to blocks and pixels and/or drops out suddenly.

About the range of transmission.  The current digital transmission technique was designed to have about the same range as the analog transmissions.  However, there are conditions under which the digital signal will be harder to detect.  Digital signals are more sensitive to "multipath interference" that occurs when more than one signal arrives at the antenna (usually reflected from buildings).  Some locations will definitely have problems.  On the other hand, there have been reports (in my area) of actually more stations being received with the new converters than were received on the analog tuner.

EDIT: I just read Susan S comment, and she is correct.  I forgot to add that the digital transmission standards allow a station to broadcast more than one channel on the same frequency allocation.  These are called sub-channel.  The station cÃ¥n make the choice of transmitting a wide band channel (HDTV) plus narrow band subchannels in SDTV.  Of course, the HDTV quality is compromised depending on how many sub channels are transmitted.  Digital does not necessarily mean HDTV, and stations are not required to broadcast any HDTV (but almost all do some).

Answer 8

No advantage eh?

So you don't want HD programs, you don't want more channels?

And yes the government is set to make a LOT of money from the sale of of the redundant frequencies to the mobile phone companies.