What’s DTV?

DTV stands for Digital Television. A digital television system is one that transforms an ordinary analogue TV signal – such as that transmitted by a studio camera or recorded on video-tape or film – into a stream of bits (or zeros and ones) before transmission. This process is called encoding.

After transmission, it needs to pass through a device called a digital set-top box (or decoder) to turn it back into a form that a standard TV receiver can display. This process is called decoding. So the salient difference between analogue and digital television, from the consumer’s point of view, is that you need to buy or rent a special box to attach to your TV set – or buy a TV with a special box inside it (this is called an IDTV - for Integrated Digital Television).