Though still two or more years away, high-definition television was brought closer to North American living rooms with the North American National Broadcasters Association’s endorsement of a made-in-the-u.s.a. digital tv standard for Canada, the u.s. and Mexico.

nanba filed a brief to the fcc in Washington supporting the adoption of the Advanced Television Systems Committee digital standard for hdtv, which has long promised a future of clear, wide-screen tv images and cd-quality sound for consumers and has been over eight years in coming.

The statement is in agreement with a brief submitted in July by the Advanced Broadcasting Systems of Canada calling for a single mandatory standard for over-the-air terrestrial tv broadcasting.

The brief is part of a number of initiatives to foster the adoption of hdtv, says Bill Roberts, secretary general of nanba, a non-profit international organization dealing with North American broadcasting issues.

nanba will also be filing a statement with Mexico’s newly formed Federal Telecommunications Commission and with Canada’s Task Force on the Implementation of Digital Television to encourage the task force to endorse the notion of compatibility amongst North American broadcasters.

‘It doesn’t make market or consumer sense to have incompatible digital tv standards along the 49th parallel,’ says Roberts.

The mandate of the Canadian digital tv task force, formed in November 1995, is to assess and make recommendations in regulatory, technical, programming and distribution matters concerning digital tv. It will likely make its views known early next year.

‘One thing the task force has had to grapple with is, do we want a common standard with the u.s., and the answer I think is yes,’ says Michael McEwen, chair of the digital tv task force and cbc’s senior advisor to the president and ceo. ‘It will make it easier to work with manufacturers and build transmitters and transmit a signal.’

McEwen says it is difficult to estimate the costs of hdtv to consumers and broadcasters. He says the task force is also looking at ‘value-added business opportunities’ which would offset broadcasters’ costs. The task force estimates mid-1998 as an optimistic startup date for digital tv.

The endorsed standard is based on technology developed by the U.S. Grand Alliance whose members include at&t, Zenith Electronics, General Instrument, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Philips Consumer Electronics, Thomson Consumer Electronics and the David Sarnoff Research Center.

The alliance was formed in 1993 at the urging of the fcc federal advisory committee on advanced tv service to devise a single, world-beating hdtv system, and in November 1995, the Grand Alliance system was approved and recommended by the advisory committee. Since then, the fcc has been considering the system and is expected to adopt the Grand Alliance standard by the end of 1996 or in early 1997.