Television, like other home entertainment technologies before it, is about to take the plunge and go digital.
The impending slow demise of analogue television doesn't mean consumers should defer purchasing new TV sets, but it does mean they should bear in mind what digital television will offer when choosing a new set.
There are no "digital televisions" on the market right now because they haven't been manufactured and, according to some dealers, won't be for five or six years. But since "digital" is the buzzword of the day you can expect lots of stickers and logos claiming digital this and digital that. But these do not mean a TV set is digital, or even that it can convert digital television signals when they come on air later this year.
The first digital television signals are expected to be broadcast via satellite, by Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB organisation. Originally scheduled to start in spring, it's now expected to get on air at the end of June, amid reports of delays in producing the million-plus set-top boxes necessary for receiving the digital signals on current TV sets.
The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are responding with digital terrestrial services, the first service scheduled to go on air next autumn. "Terrestrial" means receiving the signals via an aerial, which is predicted to be small and located inside most houses.
These satellite and terrestrial services may be received here in Ireland, although the extent of the terrestrial coverage is unclear. The third digital delivery system is cable, and although Cablelink is carrying out digital tests on its Dublin network, its plans for digital services are likely to depend on the outcome of forthcoming decisions about the company's ownership.
Mr Peter MacAvock, project office manager at Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), the body set up to develop a framework for digital terrestrial TV in Europe, says existing TV sets will need a set-top box in order to convert the new terrestrial digital TV signals when they become available.
These set-top boxes are only being produced now the first ones were demonstrated at a DVB seminar in Geneva two weeks ago and are not expected to be available until next summer, coinciding with the launch of British digital TV.
"Consumer electronics manufacturers are keeping their cards close to their chests at the moment," says Mr MacAvock, a 1991 UCD engineering graduate who has been with DVB since it was set up in 1993. He predicts "the integration of the box into the TV sets will happen quickly", because, unlike satellite and cable users, terrestrial users are not used to extra boxes on their TV sets.
He expects the technology will allow users to seamlessly change channels between digital and analogue stations, as analogue television will exist for several years yet.
A browse around television retailers in Dublin revealed some consensus on what these set-top boxes are likely to cost: £150 to £200. Mr MacAvock predicts that as well as converting digital television signals, the boxes will contain computer connectors. Since digital television will also carry data channels, this will allow Internet pages to be viewed on TV screens or sent to computers. Thus his term "multimedia home terminals" begins to make sense.
Mr MacAvock says Britain will be the first to go digital, but says "RTE is very much more active" than other smaller European organisations. Mr Peter Branagan, RTE's director of technology with special responsibility for digital television policy, says the station will start 35 to 40-channel commercial digital terrestrial broadcasts in 2000, a year later than previous expectations. He also predicts analogue transmission for a further 10 years, five years less than previously thought.
Mr Branagan says set-top boxes will only offer the full advantages of digital television if connected to the set via a SCART lead, currently used to connect many videos to TV sets. This will avoid the problems associated with the existing analogue colour system whereby some colours can contain "crawl patterns". SCART leads also allow television sound to be played via a hi-fi music system, exploiting the benefits of digital television's improved sound quality.
He says digital television here will remain "standard definition" 625 lines, unlike in the US where high definition digital television (HDTV) is part of the immediate plan. "There are no commercial plans to go HDTV in the next seven years," he says, citing the advantages of digital being more channels, interactivity, Internet access, and widescreen viewing.
In fact, widescreen is catching on already, even for analogue television. Until now, TV sets have had a width to height ratio called the aspect ratio of 4:3. Widescreen television stretches this to 16:9, which has long been more popular in cinema. The unanimous advice from television dealers contacted by The Irish Times was "get widescreen". Currently, widescreen sets cost from £150 to £300 more than similar non-widescreen sets, and can stretch non-widescreen programmes to fit the new format.
However, more and more programmes are being transmitted in widescreen mode, and these sets will better capitalise on digital television when it commences. Mr Brian Lawless, a sales assistant in Brown Thomas's television department, predicts that people will install their own "home cinemas".
Finally, all the retailers contacted sold sets boasting the new 100 hertz refresh rates, labelled, for example, by Sony as "Digital Plus". But Mr MacAvock warns that this doubling of the traditional screen refresh rate is not part of the DVB standard. Designed to reduce flicker, he personally thinks it "looks awful", making sharp edges fuzzier. "In the professional world nobody uses it," he says.
