China will boost its digital television (DTV) industry through integrating resources by establishing a national lab, a senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said Thursday.

Xu Jianping, deputy head of the High-Tech Department with the NDRC, the country's top economic planner, made the remarks at the opening ceremony of the Beijing-based National Engineering Lab for DTV.

The lab was approved by the NDRC in December 2009. "We actually started the preparation work as far back as in August 2007, when China put into operation its DTV standard," said the lab's chief Yang Zhixing, one of the drafters of the country's DTV standard.

This mandatory standard, formerly known as Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB), was first adopted in August 2006 in China, the world's fourth major standard after Europe's DVB-T, the U.S' ATSC , and Japan's ISDB-T.

The move was pushed by the government's ambition to integrate its telecommunications networks, cable TV networks and the Internet.

"The biggest challenge (for the integration of the three networks) is that we have to first switch from analogue to digital," Xu said.

China aimed to cover 360 prefecture-level cities and 2,077 counties with the DTMB system in the next 2-3 years, serving most television viewers in the country, especially those in suburban and rural areas.

Yang said DTMB was well received in Hong Kong, where it covers 61 percent of the region's TV subscribers, and 200 sets of terminal products were sold in the local market, due to the launch of a most advanced broadcasting Single Frequency Network (SFN).

However, the overseas market was as huge as the domestic one. "One major drive to set up the lab is to explore the overseas market, as the whole world is demanding the transition to digital TV," Yang said.

At least 100 countries haven't adopted any DTV standard, according to Yang. About 63 percent of the TV viewers in the world await for the digital television switchover.

China has an upper hand in the TV industry, noted Xu, saying that the country's TV sales amounted to 330 billion yuan (49.25 billion U.S. dollars) in 2009, or 98.99 million sets, accounting for 48 percent of the world's total TV output.

However, other international standards, which came into effect over a decade before China's DTMB, are also well spread in local markets. Even China is still using the Phase Alternating Line (PAL) for its analog TV, a foreign patent for which the country has to pay for years.

"Good news is that in the system simulation tests held in Cuba in September last year, our new generation DTV transmission standard outperformed three other standards in Europe, the U.S. and Japan," said Yang.

In September, China finally received a D code for its DTMB from International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which has granted A, B and C codes to the U.S., European and Japanese standards, respectively.

"Laos has started a national application for the DTMB standard in its business sector, with about 30,000 subscribers. Cambodia has announced it will adopt DTMB," he added. DTMB negotiations with some Asian, African and Latin American countries are underway.

"Our major task now focuses on the development of DTV common technology and evolvement of the DTMB standard's core technology," said Yang.

He said the new generation technology was still in the lab, but they were trying to turn it into products.

"The European DVB-T has evolved into a second generation product, which gave an advantage to its expansion in the international market. But we are confidence as we have made a breakthrough (in the key technology of DTMB's new generation)," Yang said.

Along with the Beijing lab, which is co-sponsored by 12 first-class units in DTV field and mainly for market exploration, NDRC also approved a Shenzhen-based lab mainly for technology research and development, and a Shanghai-based center for DTV intellectual property administration and operation fees. All of the three are operated under company mechanisms.

(Xinhua News Agency November 26, 2010)