High-definition television
In addition, progressive scan and higher frame rates result in a picture with less flicker and better rendering of fast motion.
The ongoing competition between companies and nations to create true HDTV spanned the entire 20th century, as each new system became higher definition than the last.
The 405-line system adopted the (at that time) revolutionary idea of interlaced scanning to overcome the flicker problem of the 240-line with its 25 Hz frame rate.
The NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) began researching to "unlock the fundamental mechanism of video and sound interactions with the five human senses" in 1964, after the Tokyo Olympics.
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), headed by Charles Ginsburg, became the testing and study authority for HDTV technology in the international theater.
In 1958, the Soviet Union developed Тransformator (Russian: Трансформатор, meaning Transformer), the first high-resolution (definition) television system capable of producing an image composed of 1,125 lines of resolution aimed at providing teleconferencing for military command.
[9] In 1979, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK first developed consumer high-definition television with a 5:3 display aspect ratio.
[11] Upon visiting a demonstration of MUSE in Washington, US President Ronald Reagan was impressed and officially declared it "a matter of national interest" to introduce HDTV to the US.
Despite efforts made to reduce analog HDTV to about twice the bandwidth of SDTV, these television formats were still distributable only by satellite.
[21] On February 23, 1994, a top broadcasting administrator in Japan admitted failure of its analog-based HDTV system, saying the U.S. digital format would be more likely a worldwide standard.
[22] However this announcement drew angry protests from broadcasters and electronic companies who invested heavily into the analog system.
[23] That year NHK started development of digital television in an attempt to catch back up to America and Europe.
[29][30] Motion-compensated DCT compression significantly reduces the amount of bandwidth required for a digital TV signal.
An aspect ratio of 16:9 was duly agreed upon at the first meeting of the IWP11/6 working party at the BBC's Research and Development establishment in Kingswood Warren.
)[citation needed] HDTV technology was introduced in the United States in the early 1990s and made official in 1993 by the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, a group of television, electronic equipment, communications companies consisting of AT&T Bell Labs, General Instrument, Philips, Sarnoff, Thomson, Zenith and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[40][41] Between 1988 and 1991, several European organizations were working on discrete cosine transform (DCT) based digital video coding standards for both SDTV and HDTV.
[45] The first regular broadcasts began on January 1, 2004, when the Belgian company Euro1080 launched the HD1 channel with the traditional Vienna New Year's Concert.
[47] The HD1 channel was initially free-to-air and mainly comprised sporting, dramatic, musical and other cultural events broadcast with a multi-lingual soundtrack on a rolling schedule of four or five hours per day.
[citation needed] These first European HDTV broadcasts used the 1080i format with MPEG-2 compression on a DVB-S signal from SES's Astra 1H satellite.
However, Freeview HD is not the first HDTV service over digital terrestrial television in Europe; Italy's RAI started broadcasting in 1080i on April 24, 2008, using the DVB-T transmission standard.
[citation needed] In October 2008, France deployed five high definition channels using DVB-T transmission standard on digital terrestrial distribution.
Sixty Hertz high definition television supports both fractional and slightly different integer rates, therefore strict usage of notation is required to avoid ambiguity.
[citation needed] For the commercial naming of a product, the frame rate is often dropped and is implied from context (e.g., a 1080i television set).
When transmitted directly through the Internet, the colors are typically pre-converted to 8-bit RGB channels for additional storage savings with the assumption that it will only be viewed only on a (sRGB) computer screen.
As an added benefit to the original broadcasters, the losses of the pre-conversion essentially make these files unsuitable for professional TV re-broadcasting.
[citation needed] Most HDTV systems support resolutions and frame rates defined either in the ATSC table 3, or in EBU specification.
The lossy compression that is used in all digital HDTV storage and transmission systems will distort the received picture when compared to the uncompressed source.
PAL, SECAM and NTSC frame rates technically apply only to analog standard-definition television, not to digital or high definition broadcasts.
To be shown on standard television, in PAL-system countries, cinema film is scanned at the TV rate of 25 frame/s, causing a speedup of 4.1 percent, which is generally considered acceptable.
[citation needed] Set top box tuners with external storage support may be able to directly record the digital video stream itself, including additional data such as teletext.
