ATSC (standards)

ATSC is a set of standards developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee for digital television transmission that replaced much of the analog NTSC television system on June 12, 2009 in the United States and will replace NTSC by August 31, 2011 in Canada and December 31, 2021 in Mexico. The ATSC standard was developed in the early 1990s by the Grand Alliance, a consortium of electronics and telecommunications companies that assembled to develop a specification for what is now known as HDTV. ATSC Standard A/53, which implemented the system developed by the Grand Alliance, was published in 1995; the standard was adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in the United States in 1996. The high definition television standards defined by the ATSC produce wide screen 16:9 images up to 1920×1080 pixels in size - more than six times the display resolution of the earlier standard. However, many different image sizes are also supported, so that up to six standard-definition "subchannels" can be broadcast on a single 6 MHz TV channel.