Digital Terrestrial Television: benefits and opportunities the 'new television' offers

The so-called “new television” operates by exploiting the same digital coding system as the current satellite television and DVD systems. Even though the new television signal is digital, it is transmitted via the ether and can therefore be received by a normal aerial installed on the roof of a house. In the case of analogue transmission, each channel occupies a bandwidth of 8MHz around the carrier frequency, which corresponds to one of the 59 frequencies available in Italy. By using digital coding it is possible to transmit the equivalent of 24Mbit per second in the same bandwidth.

Benefits and opportunities


First and foremost, it will be possible to increase the number of television channels, with up to 4 to 6 channels in the space that was previously occupied by a single analogue channel. In particular, it would be possible to create an offer consisting of approximately 250 channels, with significantly higher quality audio/video, and the capacity to include multi-channel and multi-lingual audio, and, in the near future, high definition video.

Digital television also offers the capacity to handle encrypted, and hence pay-per-view channels and transmissions, and other offers that do not require customers to become subscribers. (Impulive/Order-ahead Pay-Per-View, Pay-Per-Time, etc.). Thanks to the vast coverage of terrestrial television, “new television” offers much greater capacity than cable or satellite television, including excellent reception capacity even when the receiver is moving at speeds of up to 130Km/h, and hence the ability to compete pay-to-access mobile technologies such as DVB-H.

Last, but not least, the opportunity to exploit a new digital tool as the driver of innovative advertisement services, increasingly addressed to those television-viewers which become very important ‘consumers’.

Reply Value


Reply believes that the future of our society lies in the diffusion of new interactive channels.

For this reason, the company is supporting the main operators in this sector during the convergence process and in redefining their business models by offering consultancy services and the full range of digital technologies