by Bill Elliott, HD Director of Photography

Due to advances in electronics technology, The United States Federal Communications Commission, the governmental regulatory authority in charge of broadcast standards and rules, decided in 1984 that they should consider updating our television standard. The result of this decision was the formation of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, or A.T.S.C. After considering recommendations demonstrated by technology teams from around the world, the A.T.S.C. decided to support a digital imaging standard. The term standard implies that the A.T.S.C. decided on one format, but that's not the case. Due to the flexibility of digital technology, the A.T.S.C. decided to recommend not one, but 18 different digital formats. Only two of those formats are actually what we know as "High Definition Television."

Any time an industry takes on a change as major as digital television, the costs are high. Changes involving high costs are projects that television stations and manufacturers don't like to jump into. Television manufacturers don't want to make television sets designed to receive pictures that stations aren't transmitting yet, and television networks don't want to spend money creating and transmitting programming that only a few people can watch. Realizing this dilemma, the FCC decided to phase in the changeover to digital television. They set dates that all television stations would be required to start transmitting digital television signals by, and even mandated that in 2007 all television stations must be broadcasting their signals digitally. This would also be the date that analog licenses would be automatically revoked. This mandate meant that television stations that did not comply with the transition to digital would lose their license and not be allowed to continue broadcasting. The F.C.C. also worked with television manufacturers and came up with a phase-in schedule that ultimately requires all television sets manufactured after 2007 to contain receivers that will receive all digital broadcasts. This phase-in was complicated, since not all broadcasters chose to use the same digital transmission standard. Remember that the new standard is actually 18 different standards.

The good news is most television stations have adopted one of the two High Definition standards and they are currently broadcasting digital signals. Consumer demand for the higher quality picture has motivated manufacturers to jump on the digital television bandwagon by creating HD-ready and true HDTV televisions.