HDTV and the Transition to Digital Broadcasting

Understanding New Television Technologies

Philip Cianci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136032899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

HDTV and the Transition to Digital Broadcasting bridges the gap between non-technical personnel (management and creative) and technical by giving you a working knowledge of digital television technology, a clear understanding of the challenges of HDTV and digital broadcasting, and a scope of the ramifications of HDTV in the consumer space. Topics include methodologies and issues in HD production and distribution, as well as HDTV's impact on the future of the media business. This book contains sidebars and system diagrams that illustrate examples of broadcaster implementation of HD and HD equipment. Additionally, future trends including the integration of broadcast engineering and IT, control and descriptive metadata, DTV interactivity and personalization are explored.

1 The Dawn of HDTV and Digital Television

Walk around a consumer electronics store and look at all the different kinds of high definition televisions. Flat-panel LCDs, plasma displays, DLP and LCoS Projection TVs abound, while receivers with cathode ray tube (CRT) displays are becoming increasingly scarce.

Receiver labels proclaim “HDTV-ready,” “built-in ATSC decoder,” and “EDTV.” Display specifications tout resolutions of 1366 × 1080, 1024 × 720 and formats of 1080i, 720p or 1080p. How many different kinds of HDTV are there? What does it all mean?

As difficult as it is for the consumer, it is significantly worse for television professionals. Veteran broadcast engineers have to learn a new kind of television, one based predominantly on digital technologies. Each digital subsystem of a broadcast infrastructure is now an area of expertise that technology professionals have spent a lifetime pursuing competence in.

It may be even more of a challenge for experienced broadcast industry professionals—who don’t have engineering or computer science degrees—to understand the obscure jargon and technical complexity of modern digital broadcast systems. In the past, operational experience was usually sufficient to specify production systems. This first-hand knowledge enabled a production or operational oriented viewpoint to guide the underlying infrastructure design and facilitated the inclusion of required capabilities and desired features.

Analog broadcast systems consisted of mostly stand-alone components interconnected by real-time audio and video signals. When something went wrong, “divide and conquer” trouble-shooting techniques could be used to quickly isolate the problem and take corrective action.

All this has changed. Digital broadcasting, and its merging of broadcast engineering and information technology, has created a networked environment where every piece of equipment is interconnected.

Analog and Digital TV Compared

In analog television systems, audio and video are transmitted as one complete “composite” signal. But with digital TV, audio and video are separately processed and transmitted as discrete packets. When processing streams of digital content, there must be a way to differentiate groups of bits and bytes into program elements.

The transmission must include information that identifies which bits are video and which are audio. Assembly instructions for these components are also included in the transmission, so the digital television receiver knows how to combine the audio and video pieces into a complete program for presentation. Other data provides information for the electronic program guide, closed captions and other features.

All this is enabled by metadata, data that is not the actual audio or video content of a program but provides organizational and descriptive information which is now just as important as audio or video. Metadata is discussed in greater depth in Chapter 5.

Analog versus digital quality

Until the advent of high quality digital encoding techniques, analog audio and video was considered more aesthetically pleasing than a digital representation of the same content. So when CD technology was invented, many audiophiles argued that it was inferior to analog sound recording because the act of digitizing the audio creates steps or discrete units that approximately represent the sound, whereas sound in nature, and when represented in analog form, is a smooth, continuous wave. But digitization of sound works because these steps are so small that the auditory system perceives the sound as continuous.

An important advantage of digitization is noise immunity. For example, if electronic noise contaminates an analog audio signal, the fidelity of the sound is diminished and eventually too much noise becomes annoying. With digitized sound, a “1’ is a one and a “0” is a zero, well past the annoying analog noise threshold. In other words, the same amount of noise that makes an analog signal unpleasant has no effect at all on a digital representation of the same sound.

Perception is at the core of digital processing of visual and aural information. Reduction of audio and video data is facilitated by an understanding of the physiology, neurology and psychology of sensory stimulation. Psychovisual and psychoaural algorithmic models are applied to audio and video source material to reduce the amount of data necessary for apparent perfect fidelity. In this way, unperceived sensory information is discarded.

Data compression techniques, when properly applied to digitized audio and video, permit the transfer of high quality content over broadcast facility production networks and transmission channels. In the consumer environment, compressed media enables content transfer and consumption in a digital home media network. The explosion of MP3 audio and the rapid emergence of video downloads over the Internet is an example of how compression is an enabling technology for new content distribution business models.

Analog Television

In the U.S., the National Television System Committee (NTSC) black-and-white television standard was established in 1940. Regular over the air (OTA) broadcasts began on July 1, 1941. The aspect ratio of the display was set at 4:3 (horizontal by vertical), with 525 lines of vertical resolution, about 480 of which are active and display an image 30 times per second. In the horizontal direction, cathode ray tube technology facilitated a continuous trace and an absence of discrete picture elements, resulting in the intensity of portions of the line being varied.

In 1953, National Television Systems Committee II (NTSC II) defined the color television broadcasting technical standard. Color television broadcasts had to be compatible with NTSC I so black-and-white sets could receive and properly decode an NTSC II signal. The frame rate was altered to yield about 29.97 fps to avoid color dot-crawl effects and audio distortion.

TV engineering developed a numerical measure of the equivalent number of picture elements (“pixels”) for analog displays. However, the bandwidth of the NTSC signal reduces the number of vertical resolution elements and the number of horizontal resolution elements. The result is that an analog NTSC 4:3 display can be said to have a resolution of 340 × 330 pixels. In the computer display world this is about the same as the CGA display mode.

One must be careful not to confuse the number of lines and pixels on a display with the resolution of the display. For example, if lines of alternating white and black make up the vertical dimension of a 100-line display, then the ability to resolve visual information is half that number. Resolution is a measure of the smallest detail that can be presented, i.e., 50 pairs of alternating black and white lines. It is influenced by the audio and video signal processing chain.

Digital Television

Digital television, or DTV, presents a conceptual shift for creation production, distribution and consumption of television programs. With the advent of digital cameras, digital tape machines, compression, microprocessors, computer networks, packetized data transport and digital modulation, DTV is the consummation of communications engineering, computer science and information technologies developed in the twentieth century. In effect, DTV is a bit pipe into a receiving device. In addition to audio and video, this allows data delivery features and applications.

Digital data compression techniques, combined with error correction, facilitate “squeezing” a picture and sound into a standard broadcast channel. Although, in principle, many levels of DTV resolution are available, high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) are the two general descriptions of the level of visual detail. HDTV, when viewed on a display that supports full resolution and adequate bit rates, is close enough to reality to provide an experience of immersion, particularly if multi-channel surround sound is included in the broadcast. SDTV is similar to analog television as seen in a broadcast studio but the digital signal processing provides a superior picture in the home compared to any deliverable via NTSC.

Today, digital broadcasters have the option to “multicast.” That is, they can choose to transmit a mix of more than one HD or SD program and include data services over their delivery channel. Contemporary compression equipment can usually facilitate the transmission of one HD program and another SD program of low-resolution, slow-moving content (like weather radar) over a broadcast channel. Emerging advanced compression encoder/decoder technologies will enable delivery of even more programs and services in a broadcast channel.

Digital, expressed in its most fundamental meaning in electrical engineering, is the use of discrete voltage levels as contrasted with continuous variation of an analog voltage to represent a signal. Figure 1.1 shows the same signal in analog and digital form. This simple analog 0.0 to 1.0 Volt “ramp,” when converted to digital, can be represented by a series of numbers, i.e. 0, 1, 2… up to a defined number. In this example this is 255. This creates 256 discrete voltage levels. Generally, exponential powers are used, creating 2, 4, 8, 16 distinct voltage levels and so on.

FIGURE 1.1 Comparison of Analog and Digital “Ramp’” Signals

One primary advantage of using digital technology is that digital signals are more resistant to noise than analog signals. As shown in Figure 1.2, for a digital signal as long as the voltage level is above the 0.75 V threshold, the signal will be interpreted as a digital “1”. Similarly, if the voltage level is below the 0.25 V threshold, it will be interpreted as a digital “0”. Hence, the 0.2 V of noise riding on a digital signal has no effect on the data value. The picture, sound and data will be perfectly reconstructed.

FIGURE 1.2 Impact of Noise

However, in the analog domain, if the actual value of the voltage at the 0.5 V point on a ramp signal that is corrupted by 0.2 V of noise is measured, it will vary between 0.4 and 0.6 V. Hence, this analog signal value is significantly less precise than a digital “1” or “0”. In fact the noise will be annoyingly visible on a display.

Another important distinction between analog and digital television, as mentioned earlier, is the composition of a horizontal scan line. As illustrated in Figure 1.3, analog NTSC display lines are presented as a continuous trace on a display. DTV lines consist of discrete, individual pixels. With the migration away from CRTs towards LCD, DLP and plasma display technologies, the concept of lines and pixels is implemented as a matrix-like structure, often referred to as a pixel grid. These modern displays now have one native resolution, whereas a CRT could inherently display many different combinations of numbers of lines and pixels.

FIGURE 1.3 Analog and Digital Scan Lines

Standard Definition

SD is only associated with digital television—it does not apply to conventional analog TV. This is an important distinction, though people in the industry loosely exchange the two terms. Standard definition television (SDTV) has the same 4:3 aspect ratio as NTSC. While the exact number of active NTSC lines (480, 483 or 486) can vary, for ATSC SD transmission the picture always contains 480 active lines. For SD resolution with 4:3 aspect ratio, the source content has 720 pixels per line and the transmitted picture frame normally has the center 704 of these pixels. However, all 720 pixels may be sent as well.

The number of active lines for NSTC and has been described as 480, 483 and 486 lines depending on which “standards” document is referenced. However for SDTV the number is fixed at 480 in the ATSC standard.

The distinction between 720 and 704 horizontal pixels for an SD line is based on the technology used in digital displays or for analog CRT displays respectively.

SD content has been stretched to fill a 16:9 display. This results in a loss of horizontal resolution and the picture looks distorted.

Enhanced definition television (EDTV) is the term used to indicate widescreen, high frame rate, progressive scanning. These standards are extensions of SD and (similar to SD) define 960 and 968 samples per active line for 16:9 aspect ratio pictures.

High Definition

By now, everyone has become familiar with widescreen television displays. In the U.S., they are synonymous with HD content. Yet in Europe, widescreen TV has, until recently, offered no more resolution (just more pixels horizontally) than conventional analog television. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, the development of HDTV was a global technological battlefield, and Europe’s lack of support for HDTV in light of historical events was understandable. Until recently, European broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers felt that consumers were satisfied with widescreen SD and weren’t concerned about image resolution. To influence acceptance of HDTV, the World Cup 2006 broadcasts were an HD showcase in Europe and around the world.

HDTV is digital and defined as double (at a minimum) the resolution of conventional analog TV in both the h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Author Biography
• Introduction
• Executive Summary
• Transition to Digital
• 1. The Dawn of HDTV and Digital Television
• 2. A Compressed History of HDTV
• 3. DTV Fundamentals
• 4. The DTV Receiver
• 5. HDTV and DTV Standards
• 6. The Transition to Metadata
• 7. Emerging Technologies and Standards
• 8. The Future and Digital Broadcasting
• Index