ISDB-T International

ISDB-T International, ISDB-Tb or SBTVD, short for Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital (English: Brazilian Digital Television System), is a technical standard for digital television broadcast used in Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Philippines, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Uruguay, based on the Japanese ISDB-T standard. ISDB-T International launched into commercial operation on December 2, 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.