Digital television (DTV) is a new type of broadcasting technology that will globally transform television as we now know it. DTV refers to the complete digitization of the TV signal from transmission to reception. By transmitting TV pictures and sounds as data bits and compressing them, a digital broadcaster can carry more information than is currently possible with analog broadcast technology. This will allow for the transmission of pictures with HDTV resolution for dramatically better picture and sound quality than is currently available, or of several SDTV programs concurrently. The DTV technology can also provide high-speed data transmission, including fast Internet access.
This article is an introduction to the principles behind digital television broadcasting, including audio/video coding and multiplexing, data scrambling and conditional access, channel coding, and digital modulations. The article also compares the three major DTV standards: ATSC-T, DVB-T, and ISDB-T.