Abstract
Internet has changed the way we do business and the next revolution is Digital TV, which is changing the way we live. According to Allied Business Intelligence there would be 242 million TVs will be digital by 2005 from 40 million in 2000.

The salient features of digital TV are, Channel compression (400% compression), Dolby Audio (5.1), High resolution viewing (1080 X 1920), 16:9 aspect ratio (vide picture).

However Digital TV has the following drawbacks: As the existing TVs are analog and do not handle the digital signal, STB (Set Top Box), which converts the digital signal to analog, is required resulting in added cost. The analog TV set with STB will not be able to reproduce HDTV performance due to in sufficient pixel density and bandwidth of the amplifiers. However the performance will be better than the analog TV without STB. The cost of the Digital TV supporting HDTV, will be expensive to start with as due to finer (small size pixels), the brightness of the TV reduces. To increase the brightness the TV CRT has to be designed specially. However the cost of the Digital TV will be falling when it hits the market with volume. The MPEG-2 encoding also results in loss of information, however the quality of viewing is much better than analog TV.

Considering the merits of Digital TV compared to demerits and also the solutions to overcome the demerits, Digital TV will be a success.

The article further elaborates on the following aspects of digital TV:

Interactive TV (iTV), Architectures of Digital TV, Standards, The major players in Digital TV
Digital TV Business model, Applications in Digital TV, Opportunities in Digital TV.

Authors Dr. Pandian A Rajesh Ram Mishra

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