Technical aspects of European digital terrestrial television

Digital television is considered an integral part of the information superhighway in the 21st century. Broadband is the key word. Digital television is a reality, dozens of channels are on the air, but hundreds more are still preparing to make the move to digital television. Digital television is actually a digitized version of analog television. Therefore this paper starts by giving a short overview concerning the analog TV standards and show the advantages of digital television over traditional analog television. Then, it discusses picture sampling standards, modern coding and multiplexing standards (ISO/IEC MPEG-2) in the context of terrestrial broadcasting of TV signals. The technical aspects of a broadband digital transmission standard (DVB-T) are quite suitable for providing multimedia video based services, namely interactive digital television and video-on-demand. Our recent research results show how multiplexers can be made more profitable. The DVB-T standards are discussed and some clues concerning crucial transmission parameters are presented. A particular classification of integrated circuits (ICs) used to develop modern set-top-box architectures are discussed. This paper ends by describing Portuguese experience with DVB-T.