Supported digital television broadcast standards:

ATSC
DVB
ISDB

ATSC Family

ATSC is a set of standards developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee for digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable, and satellite networks.

The ATSC standard was developed in the early 1990s by the Grand Alliance, a consortium of electronics and telecommunications companies that assembled to develop a specification for what is now known as HDTV. ATSC formats also include standard-definition formats, although initially only HDTV services were launched in the digital format.

DVB Family

Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a suite of internationally accepted open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium with more than 270 members, and they are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The interaction of the DVB sub-standards is described in the DVB Cookbook. Many aspects of DVB are patented, including elements of the MPEG video coding and audio coding.

DVB-C

DVB-C stands for Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable and it is the DVB European consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital television over cable. This system transmits an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 family digital audio/video stream, using a QAM modulation with channel coding.

DVB-C2

On February 18, 2008 it was announced that a new standard -DVB-C2- would be developed during 2008, and a 'Call for Technologies' was issued. Proposals including simulation programs and information on patent rights could be submitted until June 16, 2008.

The results of the DVB-C2 Study Mission already provided clear indications that technologies are available allowing the performance of the second generation DVB cable transmission system to get so close to the theoretical Shannon Limit that any further improvements in the future would most likely not be able to justify the introduction of a disruptive third generation of cable transmission system.

DVB-S

DVB-S is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite; is the original Digital Video Broadcasting forward error coding and demodulation standard for satellite television and dates from 1994, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997. The first application was commercially available in France via Canal+, enabling digitally broadcast, satellite-delivered television to the public.

DVB-S2

Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S digital television broadcast standard, and was developed in 2003 and ratified by ETSI (EN 302307) in March 2005. It is based on DVB-S and the electronic news-gathering (or Digital Satellite News Gathering) standard, used by mobile units for sending sounds and images from remote locations world-wide back to their home television stations.

DVB-S2 is envisaged for broadcast services including standard and HDTV, interactive services including Internet access, and (professional) data content distribution. The development of DVB-S2 coincided with the introduction of HDTV and H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) video codecs.

DVB-T

DVB-T is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial; it is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in the UK in 1998. This system transmits compressed digital audio, video and other data in an MPEG transport stream, using coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (COFDM or OFDM) modulation.

DVB-T2

DVB-T2 is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting - Second Generation Terrestrial; it is the extension of the television standard DVB-T, issued by the consortium DVB, devised for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television.

This system transmits compressed digital audio, video, and other data in 'physical layer pipes' (PLPs), using OFDM modulation with concatenated channel coding and interleaving. The higher offered bit rate, with respect to its predecessor DVB-T, makes it a suited system for carrying HDTV signals on the terrestrial TV channel (though many broadcasters still use plain DVB-T for this purpose).

ISDB Family

Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) is a Japanese standard for digital television (DTV) and digital radio used by the country's radio and television stations. ISDB replaced the previously used MUSE 'Hi-vision' analogue HDTV system. A derivative of ISDB, ISDB-T International, was developed by the Brazilian government and is being widely adopted in South America.

ISDB-S

Japan started digital broadcasting using the DVB-S standard by PerfecTV in October/1996, and DirecTV in December/1997, with communication satellites. Still, DVB-S did not satisfy the requirements of Japanese broadcasters, such as NHK, key commercial broadcasting stations like Nippon Television, TBS, Fuji Television, tv asahi, TV Tokyo, and WOWOW (Movie-only Pay-TV broadcasting). Consequently, ARIB developed the ISDB-S standards. The requirements were HDTV capability, interactive services, network access and effective frequency utilization, and other technical requirements. The DVB-S standard allows the transmission of a bit stream of roughly 34 Mbit/s with a satellite transponder, which means the transponder can send one HDTV channel.

Unfortunately, the NHK broadcasting satellite had only four vacant transponders, which led ARIB and NHK to develop ISDB-S: The new standard could transmit at 51 Mbit/s with a single transponder, which means that ISDB-S is 1.5 times more efficient than DVB-S and that one transponder can transmit two HDTV channels, along with other independent audio and data. Digital satellite broadcasting (BS digital) was started by NHK and followed commercial broadcasting stations on 1 December 2000. Today, SKY PerfecTV!, successor of Skyport TV, and Sky D, CS burn, Platone, EP, DirecTV, J Sky B, and PerfecTV!, adopted the ISDB-S system for use on the 110 degree (east longitude) wide-band communication satellite.

ISDB-T

HDTV was invented at NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories (Japan Broadcasting Corporation's Science & Technical Research Laboratories). The research for HDTV started as early the 1960s, though a standard was proposed to the ITU-R (CCIR) only in 1973. By the 1980s, a high definition television camera, cathode-ray tube, video tape recorder and editing equipment, among others, had been developed. In 1982 NHK developed MUSE (Multiple sub-nyquist sampling Encoding), the first HDTV video compression and transmission system.

MUSE used digital video compression, but for transmission frequency modulation was used after a digital-to-analog converter converted the digital signal. In 1987, NHK demonstrated MUSE in Washington D.C. and NAB. The demonstration made a great impression in the U.S. As a result, the U.S. developed its own ATSC terrestrial DTV system. Europe also developed their own DTV system, DVB. Japan began R&D of a completely digital system in the 1980s that led to ISDB. Japan began terrestrial digital broadcasting, using ISDB-T standard by NHK and commercial broadcasting stations, on 1 December 2003.