Globally, from the satellite digital TV started in 1994 to the Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting started at the end of 1998, digital TV has started up completely. By the end of 2005, there have been 170 million consumers of digital TV worldwide, increasing by about 40 million consumers compared to 2004. The UK has the highest pervasion ratio of digital TV all over the world at 70%, followed by USA with a pervasion ratio of 55%; while in Japan it is 50% and in Europe it's about 30%; globally a little more than 16% on an average.
It is obvious that the digital TV pervasion ratio in China is much lower than that of the globally average level, even a bigger gap between UK and USA respectively. Reasons for this are various, including policy, funding and the lack of content, etc.
China's cable TV (CATV) industry has a history of 30 years up to 2006. Through years of development, CATV is now the largest cable TV network throughout the world and has become one of the most important components in China's radio TV industry. Currently, China's digital TV is mainly cable digital TV relying upon the CATV network.
Digital mobile TV realizes the broadcasting and receiving of digital programs through radio digital signal emission and ground digital receiver, taking buses, taxis, subways, light rails, business cars and personal cars, etc as its carriers. In a sense, mobile TV has become the best information channel of some citizens.
China started to transmit CCTV programs nationwide with communication satellites in 1985. For the past 21 years, China has made a great progress in satellite broadcasting & TV technology. The adoption of satellite digital compression technology elevates the signal quality of TV programs from CCTV or provincial broadcast TV stations and expands the population coverage of broadcast and TV. Thanks to satellite television 1,226 million Chinese were covered in 2005, with a coverage ratio of 95.81%, much higher than the 68.3% in 1985. Yet due to a certain policy factor, live broadcast of digital TV in China is still being restricted to some extent. Anyway, nothing can hinder its development trend in the long term.
Compared with developed countries, China has lagged far behind in the field of digital TV, yet it made rapid progress in 2005; altogether 4.13 million Chinese subscribed digital TV, increasing by over twofold compared to the previous year. Among them, 3.97 million were digital cable digital TV subscribers.
Also, problems can be found in China's DTV industry: backward standards, difficulties in network consolidation, deficient terminal, immature market, serious shortage of content, deep-rooted receiving habit, want of price system, immature core technology, incomplete DTV industrial chain, need of further probe in business modes and systems. All these factors severely restrict the development of the DTV industry in China.
It can be seen from the development trend that DTV is bound to substitute for analog TV. However, as to digital pay TV, China is still exploring a suitable operation mode and there is still a long period of time before its maturity. SARFT (The State Administration of Radio Film and Television) of P.R.C. is always vigorously popularizing DTV in China. The Chinese government, along with channel suppliers, channel integrators and cable network operators is zealous about the popularization of DTV, offering a fairly good and unique circumstance for the development of digital pay TV. With the rise of DTV, China has established relevant policies to gradually eliminate analog TV and enter the era of DTV. China has planned to stop the transmission of analog TV programs nationwide by 2015. Meanwhile, as the wide spread of DTV, there will be some new trends in operation modes. Thereupon, we can say that DTV will have a bright future in China.
