Digital Television By: Kaitlyn Duddy

History of Television *In 1935 an electronic system was successfully introduced by a twenty-one year old, Philo Taylor Farnsworth. * In 1939, RCA bought a license to use Farnsworth’s television patterns. They soon began selling five by twelve inch television sets. Very few people had these televisions and those who did watched a blurry picture on a two or three inch screen. It wasn’t until 1953-1955 that television really started to progress and it hasn’t stopped since. We have come a long way from 5 by 12 inch television sets. Today, some people own televisions with a screen size of 60 inches.

What is Digital Television? Digital Television (DTV) refers to, “transmitting a broadcasting signal by encoding it as zeroes and ones - the digital code used in computers. DTV can be compressed to provide four, five, or more channels in the same bandwidth required for one channel of the current standard television.”

How DTV works . Digital television allows television pictures, sound, and new data services to be transmitted digitally, rather than analog. The data rate of the digital television is 19.44Mbps in the 6 MHz broadcast television channel. This data rate is similar to telephone modems that have approximately between 28 and 56 Kbps.

Costs of Digital TV Digital television sets are now selling for under $2,000. In 1998, they were selling for over $3,500. Now, in 2004, digital televisions are supposed to drop to around $1,400.

DTV Statistics In 2002 unit sales were the following: HDTV 87% Projection screens 70.7% 16:9 aspect ratio 54% 5.1 decoder 2.6% - ATSC Digital Decoder 13.3%

Why Switch to DTV Broadcasters will be able to send more data over the airwaves using the digital signal that can hold more data. This produces a more detailed picture, digital quality sound, more television channels, and new digital only radio channels. Also, the sets themselves will be flatter, more like movie theater screens.