Freeview has welcomed the latest Digital Tracker report for April to June this year, released by the Federal Government’s Digital Switchover Taskforce. In its 10th survey, the taskforce commissioned Newspoll to undertake research into Australian households’ readiness for digital television.

In Sydney, digital conversion has jumped five percentage points to 78 per cent in this quarter, while remote Western Australia rose nine percentage points to 67 per cent .

Digital conversion in both Melbourne and Brisbane increased two percentage points to 81 per cent, while Adelaide was up three percentage points to 85 per cent.

The highest level of digital conversion was in Darwin, where 89 per cent of households have switched (up from 87 per cent in the first quarter).

Eighty two per cent of households in Australia, or more than nine million households, have converted their main set to digital television, which represents a jump of 35 percentage points since Quarter 1, 2009, when the survey began and just 47 per cent of Australian households had converted to digital.

The report also found that for those with digital television, 85 per cent are satisfied with it, nominating the number of channels available as their main reason.

Freeview Chairman, Kim Dalton said that the latest figures, which show a continued steady increase in conversion to digital, demonstrated that Australians understood the strength of the Freeview offer – quality programs and more choice, all for free.

“Given that the analogue switch off is still two years away, this latest report shows that Australians are continuing to embrace Freeview by converting to digital,” Kim said. “In addition, it was particularly pleasing to see Australia’s biggest city of Sydney now has more than three quarters of households with digital TV.”

Regional Victoria became Australia’s third digital only region, switching over in May 2011 and 95 per cent of households in that region have converted.

Regional Queensland is due to switch to digital on 6th of December 2011 and includes the areas of Capricornia, Darling Downs, Far North Queensland, North Queensland, Queensland Central Coast / Whitsundays and Wide Bay.

Rank Program Channel Variable AverageAudience
1 PAUL BLART: MALL COP-EV Network GO! 337000
2 HEARTBEAT (R) Network 7TWO 336000
3 HEARTBEAT-WED (R) Network 7TWO 330000
4 HEARTBEAT-SAT (R) Network 7TWO 322000
5 THE WEDDING SINGER -EV Network GO! 319000
6 NEIGHBOURS Network ELEVEN 300000
7 2011 MOTOGP: PHILLIP ISLAND Network ONE 299000
8 KEEPING UP APPEARANCES-MON Network 7TWO 277000
9 AMERICAN PICKERS Network 7mate 272000
10 FOOL’S GOLD -EV Network GO! 269000

The top 10 programs on Freeview’s digital multi-channels in regional Australia for October 2011 were:

Rank Program Channel Variable Average Audience
1 HEARTBEAT-SAT (R) Network 7TWO 183,431
2 HEARTBEAT-WED (R) Network 7TWO 182,956
3 ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY Network 7TWO 169,769
4 HEARTBEAT (R) Network 7TWO 164,945
5 THE BIG BANG THEORY Network GO! 156,702
6 ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY (R) Network 7TWO 151,530
7 NEIGHBOURS Network ELEVEN 149,861
8 FOOL’S GOLD -EV Network GO! 145,959
9 KEEPING UP APPEARANCES-MON Network 7TWO 145,950
10 ESCAPE TO THE COUNTRY-SUN Network 7TWO 141,955

Source: Regional TAM
* Figures are for Freeview’s 10 digital channels, excluding the five primary channels (ABC1, Seven, Nine, TEN, SBS ONE)
(R) = Repeat
(EV) = Evening or overnight re-run of earlier transmission (same-day)
(TXI) = First transmission

Technical information

Digital terrestrial television broadcasting systems by country

Formats and bandwidth

Digital television supports many different picture formats defined by the broadcast television systems which are a combination of size, aspect ratio (width to height ratio).

With digital terrestrial television (DTV) broadcasting, the range of formats can be broadly divided into two categories: high definition television (HDTV) for the transmission of high-definition video and standard-definition television (SDTV). These terms by themselves are not very precise, and many subtle intermediate cases exist.

One of several different HDTV formats that can be transmitted over DTV is: 1280 × 720 pixels in progressive scan mode (abbreviated 720p) or 1920 × 1080 pixels in interlaced video mode (1080i). Each of these utilizes a 16:9 aspect ratio. (Some televisions are capable of receiving an HD resolution of 1920 × 1080 at a 60 Hz progressive scan frame rate — known as 1080p.) HDTV cannot be transmitted over current analog television channels because of channel capacity issues.

Standard definition TV (SDTV), by comparison, may use one of several different formats taking the form of various aspect ratios depending on the technology used in the country of broadcast. For 4:3 aspect-ratio broadcasts, the 640 × 480 format is used in NTSC countries, while 720 × 576 is used in PAL countries. For 16:9 broadcasts, the 704 × 480 format is used in NTSC countries, while 720 × 576 is used in PAL countries. However, broadcasters may choose to reduce these resolutions to save bandwidth (e.g., many DVB-T channels in the United Kingdom use a horizontal resolution of 544 or 704 pixels per line).^[1]

Each commercial broadcasting terrestrial television DTV channel in North America is permitted to be broadcast at a bit rate up to 19 megabits per second. However, the broadcaster does not need to use this entire bandwidth for just one broadcast channel. Instead the broadcast can use the channel to include PSIP and can also subdivide across several video subchannels (aka feeds) of varying quality and compression rates, including non-video datacasting services that allow one-way high-bandwidth streaming of data to computers like National Datacast.

A broadcaster may opt to use a standard-definition (SDTV) digital signal instead of an HDTV signal, because current convention allows the bandwidth of a DTV channel (or “multiplex“) to be subdivided into multiple digital subchannels, (similar to what most FM radio stations offer with HD Radio), providing multiple feeds of entirely different television programming on the same channel. This ability to provide either a single HDTV feed or multiple lower-resolution feeds is often referred to as distributing one’s “bit budget” or multicasting. This can sometimes be arranged automatically, using a statistical multiplexer (or “stat-mux”). With some implementations, image resolution may be less directly limited by bandwidth; for example in DVB-T, broadcasters can choose from several different modulation schemes, giving them the option to reduce the transmission bitrate and make reception easier for more distant or mobile viewers.

Reception

There are a number of different ways to receive digital television. One of the oldest means of receiving DTV (and TV in general) is using an antenna (television) (known as an aerial in some countries). This way is known as Digital terrestrial television (DTT). With DTT, viewers are limited to whatever channels the antenna picks up. Signal quality will also vary.

Other ways have been devised to receive digital television. Among the most familiar to people are digital cable and digital satellite. In some countries where transmissions of TV signals are normally achieved by microwaves, digital MMDS is used. Other standards, such as Digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) and DVB-H, have been devised to allow handheld devices such as mobile phones to receive TV signals. Another way is IPTV, that is receiving TV via Internet Protocol, relying on Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or optical cable line. Finally, an alternative way is to receive digital TV signals via the open Internet. For example, there is P2P (peer-to-peer) Internet television software that can be used to watch TV on a computer.

Some signals carry encryption and specify use conditions (such as “may not be recorded” or “may not be viewed on displays larger than 1 m in diagonal measure”) backed up with the force of law under the WIPO Copyright Treaty and national legislation implementing it, such as the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Access to encrypted channels can be controlled by a removable smart card, for example via the Common Interface (DVB-CI) standard for Europe and via Point Of Deployment (POD) for IS or named differently CableCard.

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