ISDB-T International, or SBTVD, short for Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital (), is a technical standard for digital television broadcast used in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Botswana, Chile, Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Philippines, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Uruguay, based on the Japanese ISDB-T standard. ISDB-T International launched into commercial operation on 2 December 2007, in São Paulo, Brazil, as SBTVD.
ISDB-T International is also called ISDB-Tb (ISDB-T Japanese standard, Brazilian version) and basically differs from original ISDB-T by using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC as a video compression standard (ISDB-T uses H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2), a presentation rate of 30 frames per second even in portable devices (ISDB-T, One seg, uses 15 frame/s for portable devices) and powerful interaction using middleware Ginga, composed by Ginga-NCL and Ginga-J modules (ISDB-T uses BML).
The ISDB-T International standard was developed as SBTVD by a study group coordinated by the Brazilian Ministry of Communications and was led by the Brazilian Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL) with support from the Telecommunication's Research and Development Centre (CPqD). The study group was composed of members of ten other Brazilian ministries, the National Institute for Information Technology (ITI), several Brazilian universities, broadcast professional organizations, and manufacturers of broadcast/reception devices. The objective of the group was to develop and implement a DTV (Digital TV) standard in Brazil, addressing not only technical and economical issues, but also and mainly mitigating the digital divide, that is, to promote inclusion of those living apart from today's information society. Another goal was to enable access to e-government, i.e. to make government closer to the population, since in Brazil 95.1% of households have at least one TV set.
In January 2009, the Brazilian-Japanese study group for digital TV finished and published a specification document joining the Japanese ISDB-T with Brazilian SBTVD, resulting in a specification now called "ISDB-T International". ISDB-T International is the system that is proposed by Japan and Brazil for use in other countries in South America and around the world.
History
The history of SBTVD development can be divided in two major periods: a) Initial Studies and Tests; b) Implementation of Digital TV Work Group and final definition of SBTVD standard.
Initial studies
Since 1994 a group composed of technicians from Brazilian Society for Television Engineering (SET) and Brazilian Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (ABERT) has been analyzing existing digital TV standards (American ATSC, European DVB-T and Japanese ISDB-T) and its technical aspects but the discussion become a robust study only in 1998.
From 1998 to 2000, the ABERT and SET group, supported by Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie developed a very complete study based on several tests considering not only technical characteristics of each standard but also signal quality, both indoor and outdoor. That was the first complete study comparing all three major DTV standards in the world by an independent entity (i.e. without influence of the ATSC Committee, DVB Group or ARIB/DiBEG Group) and it was considered a very rigorous and robust study by the DTV technical world community.
The results of the "Brazilian digital television tests" showed the insufficient quality for indoor reception presented by ATSC (that is a very important parameter because 47% of television sets in Brazil use only an internal antenna) and, between DVB-T and ISDB-T, the last one presented superior performance in indoor reception and flexibility to access digital services and TV programs through non-mobile, mobile or portable receivers with impressive quality.
In parallel in 1998, the Brazilian Ministry of Communication ordered the National Telecommunication Agency to carry on studies to select and implement a DTV standard in Brazil. Due to the completeness and quality of the ABERT/SET/Mackenzie study, ANATEL considered that as the official result and supported it considering ISDB-T the better standard to be implemented in Brazil.
However the final decision about the standard selected wasn't announced at that moment (August 2000) because of three main points: Some groups of society wanted to be more involved in that decision; The ATSC Committee and DVB Group wanted to review the ABERT/SET/Mackenzie report and ANATEL decision; Political discussions brought new requirements for the standard to be implemented in Brazil, such as digital inclusion and e-gov dissemination.