Digital television technology emerged to public view in the 1990s. In the United States professional action was spurred by a demonstration in 1987 of a new analog high-definition television (HDTV) system by NHK, Japan’s public television network. This incited the FCC to declare an open competition to create American HDTV, and in June 1990 the General Instrument Corporation (GI) surprised the industry by announcing the world’s first all-digital television system. Designed by the Korean-born engineer Woo Paik, the GI system displayed a 1,080-line colour picture on a wide-screen receiver and managed to transmit the necessary information for this picture over a conventional television channel. Heretofore, the main obstacle to producing digital TV had been the problem of bandwidth. Even a standard-definition television (SDTV) signal, after digitizing, would occupy more than 10 times the radio frequency space as conventional analog television, which is typically broadcast in a six-megahertz channel. HDTV, in order to be a practical alternative, would have to be compressed into about 1 percent of its original space. The GI team surmounted the problem by transmitting only changes in the picture, once a complete frame existed.

Within a few months of GI’s announcement, both the Zenith Electronics Corporation and the David Sarnoff Research Center (formerly RCA Laboratories) announced their own digital HDTV systems. In 1993 these and four other TV laboratories formed a “Grand Alliance” to develop marketable HDTV. In the meantime, an entire range of new possibilities aside from HDTV emerged. Digital broadcasters could certainly show a high-definition picture over a regular six-megahertz channel, but they might “multicast” instead, transmitting five or six digital standard-definition programs over that same channel. Indeed, digital transmission made “smart TV” a real possibility, where the home receiver might become a computer in its own right. This meant that broadcasters might offer not only pay-per-view or interactive entertainment programming but also computer services such as e-mail, two-way paging, and Internet access.

In late 1996 the FCC approved standards proposed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) for all digital television, both high-definition and standard-definition, in the United States. According to the FCC’s plan, all stations in the country would be broadcasting digitally by May 1, 2003, on a second channel. They would still be broadcasting in analog as well; programs would be “simulcast” in digital and analog, giving the public time to make the switch gradually. In 2006 analog transmissions would cease, old TV sets would become useless, and broadcasters would return their original analog spectrum to the government to be auctioned off for other uses.

At least such was the plan. In a very short time the FCC’s schedule seemed in doubt, as the future form of digital TV remained unclear. Less than 3 percent of the 25 million TV sets sold in America in 2000 were digital, and although 150 stations in 52 cities were broadcasting digitally by that year, most of those stations were merely broadcasting standard-definition programs in digital format. Almost no HDTV was to be seen, and few viewers were even aware of the digital channels. Furthermore, although two-thirds of American viewers had cable TV, most cable companies were refusing to carry the new digital channels. In response, the FCC was considering a rule requiring them to do so; but this in turn would require consumers to purchase a digital cable box, and there was much disagreement within the industry on how to design such a box.

Europe, meanwhile, was far ahead of the United States in digital broadcasting, partly because there was no requirement to incorporate HDTV. In 1993 a consortium of European broadcasters, manufacturers, and regulatory bodies agreed on the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard, and efforts were begun to apply this standard to satellite, cable, and then terrestrial broadcasting. By the end of the decade some 30 percent of all homes in the United Kingdom had access to digital programming via digital TV sets or via conversion boxes atop their analog sets. Japan began its own digital broadcasting via satellite in December 2000 and planned to begin digital terrestrial broadcasting, using a modification of DVB, in 2003. Both Japan and Europe had target dates similar to that of the United States for ultimate conversion to digital television—i.e., between 2006 and 2010. However, they too faced similar stumbling blocks, so that timetables for the full transition to digital television were in doubt around the world.