Digital Television Broadcasting – A Swedish Perspective

Digital technology was first picked up as a means to convey HDTV signals when analog technology proved to be insufficient. This was the original reason for us to choose a digital solution for HD-DIVINE, and I guess the same is true for the digital proposals in the U.S. Now that we have our digital systems it turns out that we are facing a completely new media situation. With digital systems we can use a computer to receive and process signals. This allows for interactive services, where several concurrent services can be selected individually by the viewer and merged together to form a completely new and tailor-made experience for each viewer. The capacity to caiq TV signals of the available media will multiply compared with today, while digital technology will bring down distribution and production costs. The individual viewer can choose to receive signals from broadcasters, specialist companies delivering through telecom networks, different kinds of computer software to process and interconnect different services, databases on CD-ROM, other individuals sending information, etc. What we can see is a completely different media landscape; new structures and services will emerge and each player today has to redefine his own role now to be fit for tomorrow.

Published

1994-01

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001285

ISBN

978-1-61482-945-4