General Electric Co’s NBC Inc has made its digital television standard choice and sided with the high definition television model. NBC announced that it will offer its 13 stations and its affiliates lower resolution 480 digital television signals in the first instance, and gradually increase that to 1080 interlaced signal, the highest resolution for high definition television. NBC unveiled the decision at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas this week. Some networks have toyed with avoiding HDTV and using the wide digital broadcast spectrum to multicast several channels instead, freeing up the rest of the digital bandwidth for added features like interactivity and data to be broadcast alongside programs. High definition televisions, when they eventually come to market, should be able to support both standards. On Thursday last week, two of the three largest television networks in the US unveiled their plans for high definition television, choosing different broadcasting formats. CBS stuck with the interlaced format, but ABC, owned by Walt Disney Co, said it would adopt progressive scan technology. CBS says that the 1080 line interlaces format results in sharper images, and is better for the unpredictable conditions of live broadcasting, where light conditions vary. Progressive scanning deals with static video images such as text more easily, and is therefore more attractive to the computer vendors.
