The German Way: Life in Austria, Germany, Switzerland
Germany Falls Behind — in HDTV

The world is divided into three main television standards — and digital TV (DTV) isn’t much help in sorting it all out.

TV screen photo
Curt Jurgens stars in a classic black-and-white German movie broadcast by RBB in Berlin. PHOTO © Hyde Flippo
Why such a confusing state of television in the world? Well, it’s really a matter of three nations and national pride. The Germans demonstrated one of the first TV productions in 1928 in Berlin, but the Americans were the first to develop a broadcast TV standard and later a color television standard that was also compatible with existing black-and-white TV receivers. So now the world has three different TV standards:

  • NTSC (now digital ATSC), used in North and Central America and Japan
  • PAL, a German-invented system used in the UK and most of Europe, Africa, Australia, and South America
  • SECAM, used in France (its inventor), eastern Europe, and Russia

The price the U.S. paid for being first was that the other systems, developed later, could learn from and improve on NTSC — which some wags call “Never (Twice) The Same Color.” Although the NTSC color standard is inconsistent and technologically inferior to systems developed later (except for a faster frame-per-second rate), many technical developments have improved the NTSC picture over the years. But now that NTSC has given way to digital ATSC, the U.S. has regained the lead in TV technology, compared to Germany.

Digital TV: DVB-T
Although Germany took the lead in broadcasting over-the-air digital TV (DVB-T) in 2003 (starting in greater Berlin), that brought German viewers few real benefits — and no high-definition (HD) programming at all. (Terrestial TV in Germany will be completely digital by the end of 2009.) Germany’s DVB-T is broadcast in a wide-screen (16:9) format for some programming, but at the standard PAL resolution of 576 visible lines. Even HDTV via satellite or cable in Germany has remained very limited.

The German public TV broadcasters (ARD and ZDF) failed to offer HDTV for the 2008 World Cup games, despite the fact that the games were broadcast in high definition. (They are promising the 2010 Winter Olympics in HD, but Germany is not alone in lagging behind. In the UK, only 20 percent of homes are predicted to have a TV set that can display HD by 2010, but at least the BBC is already broadcasting HDTV.) Austrian TV (ORF) did broadcast the 2008 games in HD, but only in 720p, not full HD.

One possible reason for the slow adoption of HDTV in Germany and Europe is the fact that the standard PAL TV picture has always had more lines of resolution than NTSC in the U.S. (and in Japan, Mexico, and some other countries). For Americans, the jump from a TV picture with 480 lines (NTSC) to 1080 for HDTV is much more apparent than going from 576 lines (PAL) in Germany. Still, HDTV is almost twice as sharp as the standard digital TV picture seen by Germans today.

You can buy HD-ready flat-screen TVs in Germany, but the only hi-def image (hochauflösendes Bild) that Germans can currently view on their flat-screen 16:9 TV displays has to come from a Blu-ray disc or satellite or cable pay-TV.

So what does all this mean for someone moving from North America to Germany? See the next page.

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Hyde Flippo is solely responsible for the content of this site and, other than permission granted to publish copyrighted material, McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Publishing has no direct involvement, financial or otherwise, with this site. When in Germany, Do As the Germans ©2002 McGraw-Hill; The German Way ©1997 McGraw-Hill/Passport Books. All rights reserved | Site Map | Advertise with us!