Yet another country looks like officially plumping for the Japanese ISDB-T standard for digital-terrestrial TV over Europe’s DVB, this time a little closer to home than the Latin American countries queuing up to hitch their wagons to Japan’s.
A draft circular from regulator the Philippines’ National Telecommunications Commission last week recommended the government choose ISDB-T for the country’s DTT platform. That is a switch from its original 2006 position which recommended DVB adoption.
Both ABS-CBN Broadcasting and GMA Network, the Philippines top commercial free-to-air broadcasters, as well as government networks NBN, RPN and IBC have reportedly backed ISDB-T. And the country’s general election earlier this year was covered by terrestrial broadcaster Net 25 using ISDB-T.
Analogue switch off is scheduled for the end of 2015.
© Rapid TV News 2010
The reason why is that though DVB-T might be popular, still, in technical terms, ISDB-T is certainly a lot better over it that it is proven more robust and can handle many types of interferences a lot better and has several services that cater its viewers such as datacasting, Emergency Warning System and other interactive services. Aside from that, it also has a mobile DTV service known as 1seg that is transmitted together with the HD or SD programs at the same channel.
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