Digital TV, Demystified

At the end of this year, Singapore's free-to-air terrestrial broadcasts will ditch the analogue PAL standard and fully adopt the digital DVB-T2 standard. The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has put in a lot of effort to inform, educate and advise the public about making the switch to Digital, but much of their attention is focused on how to switch, not what and why. After getting to know the educational roadshows IMDA has planned during my grassroots attachment at Changi Simei and resolving my relatives' confusion, I think that it is about time to demystify the what and the why of Digital TV using an apt analogy: language.

(The qualities I ascribe to the languages mentioned here are for the sake of argument only.)

Suppose we have been speaking English all the while. Life is pretty good. English has served us well, but it has two problems:

1. It's long (polysyllabic), and therefore each word takes a long time to say
2. Each word has only one meaning, so English is not very versatile
3. English gets miscommunicated very easily; if you tell your friend an English sentence, by the time your friend tells it to their friend and goes around one big loop before coming back to you, what you hear is completely different from what you had originally said

Suppose Mandarin doesn't suffer from these two problems because Mandarin has these qualities:

1. It's short (monosyllabic), and in one minute, more Mandarin than English words can be spoken
2. Each word has many meanings, so Mandarin is more versatile
3. Mandarin is harder to miscommunicate; if you tell your friend a Mandarin sentence, even after the your friend tells it to their friend and it eventually travels back to you, what you hear is 90% the same as what you had originally said

For all these reasons, the government has mandated that everyone in the country shall stop speaking English and start speaking Mandarin by the end of 2018, so that communication is clearer and more effective.

So, what can you do? If you can speak Mandarin, then you don't need to do anything. If you cannot speak Mandarin, then you must either

1. Buy a translation machine that you must carry with you at all times,
2. Or learn Mandarin and get the language into your head (more specifically, replace yourself with a new self that understands Mandarin)

I think the language analogy illustrates this most aptly, because people have been asking me about reception via SCV coaxial cable versus RF antenna. Their reasoning is: if they already have SCV cable, then they don't need a digital decoder.

There seems to be two related misconceptions here. People think that

1. Guided (wired) transmission must be digital and unguided (wireless) transmission must be analogue;
2. Therefore, if they receive TV signals via SCV cable, they are automatically "digital-ready"

This is absolutely false. Thinking that only digital can be wired and only analogue can be wireless is the same as thinking that only Chinese can be spoken and only English can be written. The nature of transmission has no inherent connection with the nature of the signal; just as the mode of communication (speech/writing) is independent from the language you use.

Basically, everything is going to be in "Mandarin", in both "spoken" and "written" form. If your TV cannot understand "Mandarin", then you need to find a way to get your TV to do so.

Starhub TV, Singtel TV and newer, digital-ready TVs have been "taught Mandarin from the beginning", so if you have one of these, you don't have to do anything.

Otherwise, if you have a "monolingual" TV that only knows "English", you know what to do. ∎