The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) is the group, established in 1982, that developed the eponymous ATSC Standards for digital television in the United States, also adopted by Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and recently Honduras and is being considered by other countries.
Advanced television is an array of features enabled by digital technology that significantly change analog television as it has come to be known during the 20th century. The term "advanced television" was first used at the MIT Media Lab in the early 1990s to explain why High definition television was only an early step in the foreseeable enhancements to the medium. In 1996, David Weiss defined "advanced television" in his book, Issues in Advanced Television Technology to describe "an agglomeration of techniques, based largely on digital signal processing and transmission, that permits far more program material to be carried through channels than existing analog systems can manage." Today, advanced television can be characterized by four features: time shifting, addressability, interactivity and interoperability.