China rolls its own digital television standard

Somehow, when we weren't looking, China decided to thumb its nose at the myriad of global digital television standards. On August 18, the Standardization Administration of China approved DMB-T, its new digital television standard for the world's largest television market. No, it's not the same format that the South Koreans have chosen to adopt, called T-DMB. According to PC World India, this will become the new standard in China by August 1, 2007. Apparently the Middle Kingdom's digital television market is worth a staggering $125 billion, ($100 per person), or about $300 for each of the 400 million television set owners. Still no word on whether or not Hu Jintao has booked the Dave Matthews Band to play the launch date of DMB-T, though.

[Via PC World India]

[tucker @ Sep 4th 2006 9:47AM]

yay dave matthews band. thats all.

[CF @ Sep 4th 2006 10:44AM]

Ugh, dave matthews band.

[GhostDoggy @ Sep 4th 2006 11:37AM]

Exactly how different (what are the particulars) is this from South Lorea's standard, or anyone other digital TV standard? How many lines of resolution, bitrates, color bit resolution, etc., etc., etc.?

[E @ Sep 4th 2006 12:15PM]

Great. For the first time ever, there's an opportunity to standardize broadcast signals, and they manage to fark it up.

This amounts to a big pissing contest.

[Anthony @ Sep 4th 2006 3:20PM]

E. it's not China's fault, why should they pay royalties when they can simply use their own standard?

[Stephen Emperking of Middle Kingdom @ Sep 4th 2006 4:10PM]

lol, it's Central Kingdom, not Middle Kingdom. China's like a little brat right now~! Who's going to top Father U.S.A. when it grow up, and that's prlly the near future. The other rebellious kid's India~ Yay, U.S.
s losing it's grip on a lot of countries. This is why we are so eager to further advance our establishment on Moon, and Mars~ E-mail me for the reason, cheers~ Now we just need to bomb EASA and Chinese's Spacecrafts~! lol, sorry not possible~! It's gg~!

[Geek @ Sep 4th 2006 4:33PM]

They have TVs in China?

[Anthony @ Sep 4th 2006 4:35PM]

With China over 5000 years old I think you'll find the U.S. is the brat around here.

[Anthony @ Sep 4th 2006 4:37PM]

Further more I might even live to see the Chinese pissing in the dead skulls of Americans. A joyful day to be sure. :)

[Mike @ Sep 4th 2006 9:53PM]

China did the same thing with cellphones, creating TS-CDMA (or something like that). It's sounds like some frankenstein. No idea if it's actually being implemented.

The funny thing is that China thinks they can muscle companies by denying them access to their market unless they play along. The interesting thing is that this goes against their supposed free-market reforms.

While they can push it, they need to get people to buy this equipment, not to mention people to make it. It's certainly something of a pickle...

[Gan Quan @ Sep 4th 2006 11:51PM]

"China did the same thing with cellphones, creating TS-CDMA (or something like that). It's sounds like some frankenstein. No idea if it's actually being implemented."

It's TD-SCDMA, The company behind it worked hard to implement it, and there have been experimental products, with flaws though.
Sure TD-SCDMA is less [i]perfect[/i] compare to WCDMA/CDMA2000/..., but its followers will be better. Who cares when we can catch up with western technologies, we have the biggest market, hahahahahah~~~~
btw, I graduated from the college behind TD-SCDMA, I'm quite proud

[Balabok @ Sep 5th 2006 11:14PM]

I, for one, welcomw our old Chinese overlords.

[Paris @ Sep 7th 2006 12:25PM]

... i want to knwo what the pretty building in the picture is...

[Bob Miller @ Sep 9th 2006 10:51AM]

The pretty building in the picture above is the CCTV building in Beijing still under construction I believe. Tricky to build, they may never get it done.

[Bob Miller @ Sep 9th 2006 11:40AM]

S. Korea did not choose T-DMB as its digital TV modulation. They choose 8-VSB just like the US did. They are using T-DMB, COFDM based, in one MHz wide DAB spectrum for mobile video.

This new Chinese standard, DMB-T/H, is based on TD-OFDM and could be the closest thing to a world standard since China represents a good bit of it. It works, out of the box, for both mobile and fixed receivers and is probably the best digital TV modulation yet.

Expect to see a lot of it at the coming Olympics.

[underthebridge @ Sep 12th 2006 6:09AM]

Dave's shit keeps fallin on my head, da da ka ka wa

[George @ Jan 30th 2007 3:49AM]

A lot of the world's digital TV products in any standard are made in China. Having a local Chinese standard is probably going to make it harder for sellers in China to test the marketability and operability of these other standards, e.g. DVB-T

Digital TV products wholesale at China prices: http://www.chinavasion.com/advanced_search_result.php?search_in_description=1&keywords=dvb-t