All Over the TV Dial

Today in Tedium: Back in 2017, I wrote a nice lengthy piece on the evolution of TV technology, particularly a forthcoming standard called ATSC 3.0, which when fully rolled out could greatly change our relationship with broadcast-quality television. (Among other things, it’s based on the internet protocol, or IP, standard.) While a number of stations have voluntarily launched it around the country, there’s not really many TVs out there that natively support the technology at this time—you have to buy a set-top box to get the full experience. But ATSC 3.0 is out there in the wild as a mainstream standard in at least one country—Jamaica, where it launched in earnest just a few months ago. Today’s Tedium spends a little time thinking about television standards, because it’s what we like thinking about. — Ernie @ Tedium

(Wikimedia Commons)

Among the countries that have successfully transitioned to digital television: North Korea

One notable fact about the digital television transition is that, if you go by Wikipedia, many of the countries haven’t completed their digital television transition despite decades of lead time, and a significant number have barely even started.

The countries closer to starting than finished are usually a bit shakier on the diplomacy front than others; countries that have experienced war in recent decades, such as South Sudan and Kosovo, are on the list of countries yet to complete a transition, in some cases blowing set-in-stone regional deadlines by years.

When your country is a global hot spot, transitioning to high-quality digital TV is easier said than done. A 2015 story from Al-Monitor, for example, noted that Palestine’s DTV transition was easier said than done.

“While we are technically prepared to make the move to digital broadcasting, we can’t predict what the occupation authorities will do,” said Usama Abed, a senior official at the Palestinian Ministry of Information who was quoted in the piece.

Admittedly, that Wikipedia list may not be totally up to date, as highlighted by the story of North Korea. While South Korea’s neighbor is on the list of “transitions not yet started or planned,” along with countries like Lebanon, Chad, and Haiti, there is reporting to suggest the country actually implemented a digital television standard a few years ago.

Back in 2020, the North Korea news analysis site 38 North explained that the rise of digital television created an opportunity to give the country’s citizens something that wasn’t always a guarantee—access to multiple channels.

On top of that, the country has created an IPTV-based technology called Manbang, serving essentially as a Netflix of sorts for North Korea.

The country moved its state media channels to a multi-channel format, which the website noted was an attempt to make broadcasts more attractive to North Koreans who have more access to foreign content than they might have had in decades past.

A DVB-T2 adapter, compatible with North Korean television signals. (via AliExpress)

One strategy behind the DTV move might have been tactical in nature. The country implemented the DVB-T2 standard for digital television, which is common throughout the world, but conveniently not in the part of Asia where it is located.

“That means North Korean digital TVs won’t be able to receive broadcasts from neighboring countries—something that is currently a problem for authorities in the northern and southern border regions,” author Martyn Williams wrote.

When your neighbor to the south counts both Samsung and LG as major TV manufacturers, and said neighbor is among three countries to be using next-gen ATSC standards, the last thing you’d want to be doing if you’re North Korea is using the same standard as the neighbor you’re next to.

At least that’s my read on it.

A 52-inch CRT television, an Improved Definition Television-based device that has scanline-removing circuitry. (via World Radio History)

There was a stopgap between NTSC and HDTV you probably didn’t know about; in fact, there were two

But enough about broadcast standards for a second. Let’s talk television standards—particularly those you’re probably not familiar with.

For decades, we appreciated television’s ability to bring images into our home, despite a clear imperfection in how TV worked—the fact that the screen was delivering black lines between those images, a common feature of most CRT televisions interlacing. In a way, we were really only getting half the experience from our TVs, though if you sat far enough away, it was hard to notice.

It was a key aspect of the television experience, and we just lived with it. Some people obsessed with retro gaming can’t live without out.

But in the late ’80s, as rumors of a forthcoming high-definition television standard were starting to bubble up, television manufacturers had a problem. Simply put, screens were getting bigger, and with larger screens came more noticeable interlacing, meaning that to get a proper television experience, people had to sit further and further away to get a decent experience from a given screen.

TV manufacturers were looking for ways to fill the gap without waiting for broadcasters to embrace a big, hairy standard, which would cost them billions to put into place.

A 35-inch RCA Proscan Model PS35680, another example of an IDTV television set. The device weighs more than 300 pounds, per the Flickr description. (Shal Farley/Flickr)

So the TV makers came up with a stop-gap—a way to kill the interlacing on these old television sets. And that approach was something called Improved Definition Television, or IDTV. Essentially, given the existing limitations of the current television signal, manufacturers took the approach of attempting to improve the quality by simply filling in more of the picture.

This was more than possible. As anyone who used a computer monitor in the 1980s could tell you, computer CRTs were generally of a much higher fidelity than was possible with a television set.

But just as Samsung and LG go out of their way to sell us on high-end OLED screens, companies like Sony, NEC, and Panasonic were ready with IDTV-compatible sets. As Popular Mechanics noted:

By doubling the number of scan lines in each field, the vertical resolution of the picture can improve 40 percent.

Noninterlace scanning is augmented by improvements elsewhere in the signal processing chain. Philips for example, combines noninterlace scanning with a digital field-comb filter. This improves luminance and chrominance separation while reducing the number of hanging and crawling dots that some-times attack a picture.

Essentially, this was the 1980s equivalent of a common tool used on modern televisions—upscaling, the concept of showing a signal at a higher level than the original production was produced.

While this technology was somewhat obscure even for its time, it did have a somewhat more common follow-up technology, called Enhanced Definition Television or EDTV. This technology, which came out of Japan and was called ClearVision in that country, was a key bridge technology, and even benefited from some broadcasts in the Japanese market. These screens, which produced images at 480p, were better TVs than either IDTVs or the old scanline-driven ones, but were somewhat overshadowed by higher quality HDTVs, which began to emerge at roughly the same time.

But they did have a moment in the sun of sorts, thanks to video game consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast. EDTVs are well-suited for video games of the GameCube/PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox era—particularly the Dreamcast, which straight-up came with a VGA connector.

But these technologies got overshadowed, at least in the U.S. NTSC kept its hold on us in the 1990s, and soon enough, HDTV had started to emerge, making an imprint in part because it was so much better than NTSC—and in part because people were eventually forced to use it.