When the TV and TV Programming were first introduced to the public, the way that they functioned together to create a picture and sound was with a standard analog signal. It's a very basic method of broadcasting that has weaknesses that are apparent when the TV is watched, but it is still in use up to this very day, by standard TV and cable TV programming service providers.

The picture and the sound on the TV were sometimes faulty because the standard analog signal often times arrived at the TV distorted and with some other signals that it arrived with. Even if there were no other signals for it to pick up, it could still be distorted by atmospheric conditions and naturally occurring static that often times affected the signal.

This went on for years and years until the technology was developed to digitize the signal before it was sent out to be received by the TV and then used to create a picture on the screen with. When the signal is digitized, it is basically translated into computer language that a small computer in the TV then can recognize and then translate back into a signal that the TV then can turn into a picture.

A simple analogy would be if two people were trying to communicate to another person at the opposite end of a room full of noisy machinery. One person yells across the room while the other person writes a note to give to the person to read. The person that yells gets his message through, but it also arrives with some unwanted noise that makes it difficult to understand. The other person's written message, which would be the digitized signal, arrives and the noise is able to be ignored and the message gets through completely undistorted.

This alone was a great improvement and this is how the high definition signal is sent, because it allows for a far more detailed message due to the lack of distortion. The high definition TV set has twice the vertical lines of resolution and pixels in the screen and this is what the TV uses to create the picture with. The result is a picture that has six times the precision and distinction, with far more detail.

Dish Network is the leading provider of high definition programming and they currently have a total of thirty-one channels of high definition programming for their viewing family to select from when they sit down to watch TV. No other programming service provider comes close to this number of high definition channels and certainly none of the cable service providers do.

This is because high definition programming is very data intensive and the cables that cable service providers rely on can only carry a very limited amount of high definition programming signals. A high definition TV can also pick up and use standard TV programming signals, but a standard TV can't pick up and use high definition signals. If you are considering switching to high definition programming for your home or business then there is only one choice for your TV programming service provider and that is Dish Network.