Digital TV Technology- Some Facts

Digital TV seem like a new technology to many people when it becomes the only transmission format for over the air TV programming starting in February of 2009.

Digital TV basically takes advantage of computer technology to transmit television programming by converting the images and sounds into computer data before transmission.

 

Upon arrival at its destination, that computer data is then reassembled into the picture and sound that become the TV signals that you can watch.

While this may sound like a rather round about way of getting TV programs to its viewers, but it has a lot of advantages over the older analog transmission format.

One of the first things that any viewer of digital TV will notice is that it provides a very clear picture. This ability to clean up the interference will improve the picture even of TV that's transmitted over cable.

 

Digital TV comes with an on screen program guide that allows viewers to see what's on each of the channels that they have access to. Another benefit of digital TV is that it can be compressed in order to take up less bandwidth.

This means that more channels can be transmitted over the same cable or range of over the air frequencies. It's also good for anyone who wants to deliver HDTV programming.

There are a couple of inconveniences that anyone who takes advantage of over the air TV will be subjected to when the switch is made in 2009. With digital TV you either experience a crystal clear picture or you don't get any picture at all.

That's a big difference between it and analog TV which will degrade, but still be watchable well after it starts getting fuzzy. This reality alone will probably cause resurgence in the popularity of big roof top TV antennas.

Another inconvenience is caused by the fact that there are a lot of TV sets out there that don't have the digital tuners necessary to decode the digital TV signal.

This can obviously be remedied by buying a new TV, but there will also be digital receiver boxes available that will convert the digital signals to analog format before sending them to the TV set.