The 2012 London Olympics really brought home to me just what a massive technological jump in digital media has occurred during the last few years. There has been significant advances in digital compression and transmission.

This year, in addition to high definition broadcast, which made its appearance in the 2008 Beijing games, 3D television was also added to the line up, offering more channels and choices. With analogue television broadcast almost becoming extinct, digital televisions promise of delivering more for less has become a reality. Now, how did we arrive at this point and what does the future hold for digital multimedia?

Prior to the digital switchover, analogue television was resource hungry in terms of the amount of bandwidth required to carry a single channel. This is typically between 6 – 8 MHz depending on the type of video standard being used. This limited the number of channels which could be transmitted, since there is a finite amount of spectrum that must be shared with other services such as mobile, radio and two way communications.

What the digital standards of ATSC (North America) and DVB (Rest of the World) provided was the ability to reuse the existing analogue spectrum more efficiently. This meant a typical 8 MHz carrier used for analogue broadcast could be converted to DVB-T (Digital Video – Terrestrial) making it possible to carry 9 standard definition channels or 3 HD channels plus one SD channel for the same amount of bandwidth.

It would have required in excess of 70 MHz of frequency spectrum to achieve this with the old analogue standard. In addition to squeezing more channels into less space, digital television is much clearer and doesn’t suffer from ghosting or other artifacts which troubled analogue systems. Being digital also allows other features like improved digital sound, electronic program guide and subtitle support to be included.

Televisions are sold with the digital decoder integrated and older televisions can use a separate set top box. As technology advances, we will also see improvements in the compression techniques used, which means even more content for digital media, already this has enabled 3D broadcasts for some events such as the Olympics. iptv provider