This paper briefly considers future broadcasting technologies, including digital television as a system for the near future and three-dimensional television as a part of a system to be developed rather later. However, due to limitations of space, this paper discusses only video technologies in detail. First, the status of bit reduction technologies for digital television is described and then satellite digital broadcasting and terrestrial digital broadcasting are also discussed. The authors stress the necessity of the further development of digital video compression technologies. Later, we discuss three-dimensional television, we describe requirements for the service and the present status of the technologies. And last, the paper considers the future prospects for a three-dimensional television service.

Almost all broadcasting systems and their equipment would be digitalized in the near future. In Japan, investigation of digital broadcasting has been going on for a long time, aiming at a realization of improvement of picture quality, new services, system flexibility, etc. Japanese digital broadcasting systems under development have a lot of technical merits, for example, a high transmission capacity and a hierarchical transmission scheme for satellite, and mobile reception for terrestrial digital broadcasting systems, compared to conventional digital systems.