Death knell sounded for analogue
Analogue technology is doomed. This looks set to be the message speakers will deliver this week at the Asia Broadcast 97 Conference when industry professionals converge on the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Moreover, a look at the products on display at Asia CommuniTech 97 seems to confirm that digital technology is now ready to replace analogue in all areas of broadcasting.
According to broadcast professionals, the prime advantage of digital technology is that it offers superior quality over analogue.
Apart from such projects as Japan's Perfect TV and high- definition television, the state- of-the-art quality for television viewers are images generated digitally and transmitted Direct to Home (DTH) via satellite, as it is, for example, with the Star TV output and that of Malaysia's ASTRO network.
Tim Kelly, controller at TVB's engineering division, said: 'You basically have a digital stream from the camera recording the initial images to the television receiving the final product - you have a complete digital path.' The digital revolution has also opened up possibilities for greater sophistication of the broadcasters' end-product - such as the incorporation of 3- D graphics with video output.
And the price of digital products has been downward. They are now on a par with, and sometimes cheaper than, their analogue equivalents.
Even where analogue devices are cheaper, their digital equivalents are easier to install and their maintenance cost is generally less.
'We are in the second generation of digital technology now and it is significantly cheaper than first generation. The reason for our prices going down is the very large-scale integrated circuits which enables us to get more and more circuits into one chip,' said Craig Norris of Sony Broadcast Products.
Digital products also enable broadcasters to keep down costs because digitally transmitted signals can be significantly compressed. In the context of the high cost of satellite use, this can be a significant saving.
A minute of full-screen full- motion digital video will take close to 1.38 gigabytes of storage space.
The so-called MPEG compression technology expands opportunities for broadcasters by multiplying uplink capacity, enabling 16 or more channels to be transmitted via a single satellite transponder. With analogue technology, only one channel could be handled.
However, the digital revolution does not mean that television and radio broadcasters can throw away their tapes. Tape will still form a useful part of the fully digital television or radio station.
As a means of bulk storage, tape will save costs as it would be too expensive to store everything on hard disk.
The only significant resistance to the new technology is likely to come from end-users unwilling to throw away their old television sets.
