Moves to unite the fragmented world of digital terrestrial broadcasting were agreed upon at a summit of TV executives, technologists and engineers from around the world, with a commitment to mount a global approach and coordinate standards. At the Future of Broadcast Television (FoBTV) Summit in Shanghai, co-founded by the European Broadcast Union (EBU), more than 200 delegates backed a joint declaration signed by technical executives from 13 world broadcast organizations calling for worldwide cooperation on identifying requirements, unifying standards and promoting technology sharing.
Terrestrial television broadcasting has been hindered by the multiplicity of television standards and policies used by different countries. Currently, there are four widely-used variants of DTT.
There is the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) — Terrestrial, now in its second generation, adopted across the whole of Europe, Russia, India, Australasia, part of Africa and the Middle East; the Advanced Television Systems Committee for terrestrial TV for the whole of North America and much of Central America; the Japanese-developed Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) terrestrial in Japan and nearly all of South America; and DTMB (Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast) in China and Hong Kong.
