Ecuador Picks SBTVD System for DTV Broadcasting

By Doug Lung
published


Last week Ecuador joined its South American neighbors (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, and Peru) in selecting SBTVD, Brazil's modified version of Japan's ISDB-T standard, for digital terrestrial broadcasting in Ecuador.

Government officials expect to have sufficient DTV coverage to reach 90 percent of Ecuador's population within a few years. Analog broadcasting could end in as few as seven years.

With the right receiver, viewers in the Florida Keys may be able to pick up SBTVD DTV from Cuba. On Monday, Radio Netherlands Worldwide posted a report from Xinhua on SBTVD in South and Latin America -- Brazil aims to set South American digital TV standard.

According to the article, Brazil is pushing Cuba as well as Latin American countries Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica to adopt SBTVD as their DTV standard,

SBTVD is based on the Japanese ISDB-T standard. Brazil modified ISBD-T to match the channel bandwidth available in South America and has updated it to more modern video encoding methods--H.264 (MPEG-4) instead of MPEG-2. ISDB-T is a multicarrier COFDM system, similar to DVB-T, with a longer interleaver to improve performance in the presence of impulse noise.

Doug Lung
Doug Lung

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack.
A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.