They differed over colour television, they differed over digital mobile phones, and now they're differing over digital television too.
Just as European video cassettes and GSM phones cannot be used in North America, differing standards for digital television mean the Atlantic is a technological divide yet again.
Europe has agreed the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standard for digital terrestrial television, meaning television stations will use this standard for encoding the digital picture and sound. Established in 1993 by broadcasters, consumer electronics manufacturers and regulatory bodies, DVB now has more than 200 members around the world, and, like GSM, is becoming a near-global standard. Countries outside Europe which are considering using the DVB standard include China, Japan and Taiwan.
Mr Peter MacAvock, DVB's project office manager, says the work of the project involves defining telecommunications and consumer standards, as well as producing "associated statements" on areas such as anti-piracy measures and intellectual property rights pooling. He says DVB minimises the cost of digital television by maximising the commonality. "For example," he says, "this will make it easier to transfer [the signals] from satellite to cable."
But in the US, different digital television standards are being finalised. The Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) uses the same picture encoding techniques as Europe's DVB, but encodes the sound differently.
Canada and South Korea recently opted to use the ATSC standard, while Mexico, Australia and Brazil are likely to follow. The ATSC standard has many formats, ranging from 480 lines per picture to 1,080 lines per picture (current US analogue uses 525 lines). The former will allow broadcasters to transmit up to six standard channels per single HDTV channel, while the latter will support wide-screen High Definition TV (HDTV). US television executives expect stations to offer single-channel HDTV at some times, changing to multiple standard channels at others, containing programmes such as chat shows and soap operas.
Television networks in the US are committed to an ambitious plan to start digital broadcasting soon, with deadlines varying with the size of their market. Two dozen stations have volunteered to begin by next autumn, while a Federal Communications Commission plan means 40 stations must be digital by May 1999. All commercial stations have to begin digital broadcasting by 2002, but public service broadcasters have an extra year. As in Europe, existing analogue television will continue for about 10 years.
But the ATSC standards are not yet complete. Complicating the picture, computer companies want the standard to specify a type of picture scan similar to computer monitors, so that digital television signals may be received directly by PCs. This so-called "progressive scan" is being promoted by Microsoft, Compaq and Intel, eager to see more home computers in living rooms. Television tuners are already expected to be included in standard PCs in the not-too-distant future.
The lobbying by the computer companies has irritated broadcasters, who favour a continuation of the existing interlaced scan format. Mr Jim Keelor, president of Cosmos Broadcasting in South Carolina, is reported in IEEE Spectrum magazine as saying: "The computer companies make their money by providing products that become obsolete in a couple of years . . . but we are not going to tailor our industry to fatten Bill Gates's pocketbook."
Regardless of how the standards develop, electronics companies are gearing up for production of set-top boxes and new digital TV sets. Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Philips, Sony and others are looking forward to television's latest revolution (first monochrome, then colour, and now digital).
For them, digital means wider markets. Knowing that consumers will not do without television, and knowing it took colour television more than 10 years to become widespread, they are confident that demand for existing analogue sets will continue for a long time.
Meanwhile, they are looking forward to enormous new business opportunities spurred by digital television's new applications.
Eoin Licken is at eoinl@iol.ie
