Towards the beginning of the 70s the Japanese came up with the idea of having on the TV screen an image with quality similar to that of the cinema. To solve this challenge, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) began to walk the path of high definition television and that was how the engineers of this company, under the direction of Dr. Takashi Fujio laid the foundations of this technology. This working group publicly demonstrated its invention at the SMPTE conference in San Francisco, in February of '81, and for 1,984 presented to the eyes of the world the analog high-definition transmission system called MUSE (Multiple Sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding), which was aired at the beginning of 1,987 using a bandwidth of 12 MHz. The above events caused great alarm among the various levels of American television and the FCC was pressured to immediately initiate the necessary studies and programs to safeguard the interests of the economy that would be at a disadvantage in the face of the technological advance of Japan and that was how this agency organized the committee in charge of the matter, which was called ACATS (Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service). NAB asked NHK to develop a system that only occupied a bandwidth of 6 MHz, that is, a normal television channel, and the result was the appearance of the Narrow (narrow) MUSE.
The ACATS held a special panel between February 8 and 11, 1993 where three major decisions were made, perhaps the most important was the conclusion that the new television could not be analog, since the Narrow MUSE had shown that it was inconvenient because of the quality of the image delivered, the number of signals it could contain and the coverage it could give. Although this determination put the Japanese system out, the NKH continued to contribute to the development of the American digital television system ATV (Advanced TV) and its daughter HDTV or high definition television.
There are those who predict that analog transmissions will be on the air through 2010 and beyond, but the FCC calendar marks July 1, 2005, as the day of ntSC's death. This period could be shorter according to what was stated in the SMPTE magazine of the month of May 1,999, where, according to investigations carried out by different North American entities, including the FCC, by the month of May of the year 2,003 the goals will have already been met and the requirements required to turn off the obsolete analog system of the NTSC will have been met.
On December 24, 1996, the FCC adopted most of the recommendations submitted by the ATSC (Advanced Television System Committee) and contained in document A/53 known as the "ATSC Digital Television Standard". It is useful to keep in mind that the ATSC is made up of companies from the fields of television, telephony, computers and cinema, therefore we are facing a committee of technological convergence.
In 1997 Mexico and Brazil announced that they adhered to the A/53 standard for the production of digital television, thus beginning the era of numerical television from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. Today these same countries, plus Argentina, have made decisions regarding the system they must adopt for the transmission of the television signal, and although Mexico opted for the ATSC system, satellite distribution must use the DVB-S standard. Argentina and Brazil had also given their approval to the ATSC, but in recent months there have been rumors about a change of decision to move to the SIDE OF THE DVB. In the other Latin countries the use of digital technologies is practically limited to the study and digital television is reduced to digitizing ntSC signals to compress them and upload them to the satellite for distribution to earth stations, which in turn decompress the signal, and transform it back into analog for delivery to the NTSC TV.
In Europe, the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) group was formed in order to standardize digital video broadcasts and its incursions have penetrated the territory of the ATSC (United States) where the two standards are being used. As can be read in the April installment of SMPTE magazine, ATSC is DVB compatible. The biggest difference between the European and North American standards is that the ATSC standard covers only fixed terrestrial applications while the European counterpart has the DVB–S format for satellite transmission for fixed and mobile stations. In Europe, demonstrations of mobile applications with receivers in vehicles for mass transport have already been made.
DVB ensures greater flexibility for the transport of multi-program data trains allowing them to easily switch media easily, such as moving from satellite to cable distribution. In addition, it is possible for the broadcaster to choose the level of resolution that it wants to send to its users according to the profile table and level in the MPEG 2 compression standard. It also appears that the metadata contained in packages is more powerful in the DVB system.
Surely the advent of MPEG 4 will cause inconvenience to the two systems and new instructions and directions will have to be introduced within the syntax used in the programming of each of the data trains from the unitary to those that carry a multiple programming with various services within the same flow as interactivity, exogenous data, audio in different languages, and other services that will travel through the computer highways within the same container such as Internet, telephony, radio, multimedia and others.
As the radio spectrum becomes more and more congested, it will become essential to clear the radio spectrum leaving it only for mobile applications and that any fixed service is transported by fiber optic and copper networks, which will result in greater penetration of convergence technologies, which thanks to the deregulation will continue to amalgamate and in the end we will not know if when the seller of TIME magazine knocks on our door he does it to offer us a subscription to the magazine, or to a television channel, or if he will offer us telephone service, or maybe in your briefcase you bring all these products and others that we do not imagine today.
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