Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of audio and video by digital signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV. There are many DTV standards prevalent. But about 3-4 are widely used across the globe and are specific to their respective continents like Europe/Asia, North America, Japan/South America, China, Korea, etc.
This is again one very good example of competing standards which though results in better features but makes things confusing for a consumer. For e.g., a device adhering to one standard may not work with any other standard and if the consumer is moving to that region, the device becomes useless. Anywayz, keeping away politics in electronics, lets look at some of the most prevalent and widely used standards across the world.
DVB
Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium with more than 270 members, and they are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Broadcasting Union (EBU). DVB systems are used in Europe, Africa, Middle East and most of Asia except South Korea, China and Japan. DVB systems distribute data using a variety of approaches for the various medium of transmissions. They are;
Satellite: DVB-S, DVB-S2 and DVB-SH
Cable: DVB-C, DVB-C2
Terrestrial television: DVB-T, DVB-T2
Handhelds: DVB-H, DVB-SH
ATSC
ATSC is a set of standards developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee for digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable, and satellite networks. ATSC-M/H (Advanced Television Systems Committee - Mobile/Handheld) is a standard in the USA for mobile digital TV, that allows TV broadcasts to be received by mobile devices.
ISDB
Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) is a Japanese standard for digital television (DTV) and digital radio used by the country's radio and television stations. The core standards of ISDB are
ISDB-S (satellite television)
ISDB-T(terrestrial)
ISDB-C (cable)
2.6GHz band mobile broadcasting
They are all based on MPEG-2 video and audio coding as well as the transport stream described by the MPEG-2 standard, and are capable of high definition television (HDTV). ISDB-T and ISDB-Tsb are for mobile reception in TV bands. 1seg is the name of an ISDB-T service for reception on cell phones, laptop computers and vehicles. The concept was named for its similarity to ISDN, because both allow multiple channels of data to be transmitted together (a process called multiplexing).
There are some more standards DMB by China and T-DMB by South Korea too.
