Chinese regulators will soon announce a digital TV standard for the world’s biggest television market, the state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday. According to Wang Xiaojie, director of the technology department of State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the system will apply to terrestrial, satellite and cable broadcasts in China.

The government said earlier that it would start rolling out digital television broadcasts this year. Xinhua reports that China already has 4.13M households that receive digital pay-TV channels, and companies that serve them will be required to switch to the new standard. Previous sources reported that China has been testing digital cable TV since 2003 in 49 areas, with more than one million subscribers.

China has more than 120 licensed pay television channels, according to the government. It said earlier that some 30M households would sign up for digital pay channels in coming years. With about 400M television viewers, China is already is one of the leading producers of digital television sets.

My own research with several sources in the U.S. and in China has already turned up some interesting information. First, it seems that one goal was to avoid as much pre-existing intellectual property as possible-and certainly to avoid royalty payments leaving China. Therefore, the new system does not overtly use elements of ATSC, DVB or ISDB; nonetheless, some technologists (and lawyers) may argue that some parts of the system use modulation and other technologies developed elsewhere. Some analysts are predicting both lawyers and state department officials will have a field day with this one. Next, it would also seem that the internal competition to develop a "best of the best" system was not without its own politics.

Technically, there were at least three different proposals under consideration by the Chinese government. A group at Shanghai Jiao Tong University developed the first, a single carrier offset-QAM system, Advanced Digital Television Broadcast-Terrestrial (ADTB-T). Next, there was a non-single-carrier system using "Time-Domain Synchronous-OFDM" (TDS-OFDM), Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial (DMB-T), developed by a group at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Finally, a group at the Academy of Broadcasting Science (ABS) in Beijing developed a multi-carrier COFDM system, Terrestrial Interactive Multi-service Infrastructure (TiMi).

After lab testing and field trials, a "merging scheme" emerged based on these proposals. At the time of this writing, possible acronyms for the new merged transmission standard included CDMB-T and DMB-T/H. It also appears that, while the system layer may be MPEG-2, the video and audio compression scheme is being used only "provisionally" as MPEG-2, with a new Chinese standard called "AVS" (Audio-Video Standard) in development.

Early information suggests that, while many "modes" are possible for the system, these may in fact be simply groupings of characteristics from the various proponent systems. This could allow, in effect, for the different proponent systems to be used in different geographical areas. This is somewhat of a "Solomon’s solution" but not necessarily the most economical. (Think, for instance, how a "universal receiver," with both ATSC and DVB decoders could work on both sides of the Atlantic.) In addition, some observers have already questioned how well the "merged" approach might technically perform.

From a display standpoint, all of this may in fact be moot-as long as the system works and meets consumer expectations. While there is no advance information on what display formats will (or will not) be supported, it would seem that a significant deviation from the rest of the world is unlikely-but given the market size and potential revenue streams involved, such a scenario may not be farfetched. Thus, the continued proliferation of 16×9 widescreen displays, together with the growing application of scaling electronics, is expected to support this growing market and new standard in one form or another.

While the Chinese announcement has already been delayed several times, it is also likely that the official specification will be released soon-at least if there is any hope of building a significant product base in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As they say, stay tuned for more information. –AC