GOING DIGITAL

Towards the end of 1990, work started on the creation of Digital Television with Europe again at the forefront. DTV was thought to be impractical because it required vast amounts of data, which in any case would have been impossible to transmit. The requirement for digital transmission was estimated at 30 million bits per second, as compared to the 6 million bits per second required for the standard television. In came compression systems, which made it possible to compress huge amounts of data into existing channel bandwidths, so much so that it became possible to use even smaller bandwidths for transmission.

In 1993 a new group called the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (initially called the European Launching Group) was formed. Its aim was to design a universal technical standard for digital television transmissions. Simultaneously a separate organization, the Working group on Digital Television began studying the feasibility of terrestrial digital television transmissions in Europe. The end of 1993 agreed upon a world standard for digital compression upon by representatives of television engineers from 18 countries. This standard called the MPEG-2 system for compression of digital video and audio signals had the advantage of high compatibility with computer technology.

In 1994, the leaders of the Eureka EU95 project began research to convert their analog HDTV system to digital technologies. This was called the Eureka Advanced Digital Television Technologies (ADTT) project. The group worked in close consultations with the DVB projects so as to keep the research uniform and focused.

On the other hand in America, similar research was being conducted towards a fully digital HDTV system. Observing that it would be impossible to fit digital transmissions into current channel bandwidth (due to the huge amounts of data requirements) a competition was setup to invent an HDTV system that could fit into current TV channels. The Government provided no money for the research, but offered the fruit of royalties on the patents for the foreseeable TV future. Four teams of manufacturers and research centers jumped in the fray. After years of research, the four teams demonstrated their systems. Not surprisingly, none of the systems performed sufficiently well. After almost a decade of heavy in-house research expenditures, the teams could no longer afford to underwrite the development of HDTV without some kind of guaranteed return. So three of the teams creatively entered an agreement to split the royalties, no matter who won the competition. The fourth team joined them this combined research giant was named the "Grand Alliance."

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