No matter how large a TV picture became, or how digitally perfect the delivery, the NTSC interlaced standard could never look as good as digital video or film. The larger the picture, the worse it looked. What was needed was a higher definition digital picture that rivaled celluloid.

The race to develop HDTV began as an attempt by TV broad-casters to hold on to spectrum – portions of the public radio frequencies assigned to particular broadcasting uses. Analog television requires six MHz of spectrum per channel. HDTV needed double the lines of resolution in an analog NTSC picture. Broadcasters controlled more than the necessary six MHz, however, and used the extra spectrum to avoid interference between channels. In the early 1970s, the broadcasting industry lost a swath of this extra spectrum to "land mobile" (cellular phone) use. In the mid-1980s, the FCC was primed to award more UHF spectrum to land mobile. Broadcasters complained that wireless traffic so close to TV channels would cause static and interference, driving more people to cable.

Panasonic first demonstrated high-definition TV in 1974, displaying a picture of 1125 lines. In 1981, NHK demonstrated an analog 1125-line HDTV system, which prompted several American companies to begin exploring HDTV systems. In 1982, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) was established by several companies to develop voluntary standards for advanced television systems. Bell Labs, RCA and its Sarnoff Research Center, MIT, and Zenith all initiated advanced television research. In 1983, several TV manufacturing companies and broadcast networks helped fund the MIT Media Lab's Center for Advanced Television Studies (CATS).

However, NHK's MUSE (multiple subnyquist sampling encoding) was the only working HDTV system, and the National Association of Broadcasting (NAB) invited the Japanese to give a public demonstration of MUSE in Washington, D.C., on January 7, 1987.

The MUSE demonstration was spectacular. The success of MUSE prompted Congress to urge American companies to come up with an HDTV standard. As a result, in April 1987, the FCC decided not to reallocate the additional spectrum to land mobile. A few months later, the FCC created ACATS – the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service – headed by former FCC chair Richard E. Wiley. Wiley and ACATS declared an open competition for the creation of an American HDTV system. ACATS received 23 proposals.

From November 14 through 18, a time frame since known as "Hell Week," proponents of each of the 23 proposals sweated through grilling from the committee. After the smoke cleared, there remained only four viable contenders: A slightly different version of MUSE called Narrow MUSE, an analog enhanced TV system called ACTV (Advanced Compatible Television) from RCA and its Sarnoff Labs, a number of patented technologies developed by MIT's CATS, and a system from Zenith. ACATS declared that working systems would undergo evaluation in early 1990 at the newly established Advanced Television Test Center (ATTC) being built in Alexandria, Virginia.

Many of the companies decided to form partnerships to increase their chances of building the winning system. In early 1989, Zenith signed a co-development deal with AT&T's Bell Labs to help it design a partly digital TV system. A year later, RCA, Sarnoff Labs, Philips and NBC joined forces in the Advanced Television Research Consortium (ATRC) to develop its own digital HDTV system. Meanwhile, the analog MUSE system went on the air on June 3, 1989, in Japan with a one-hour show featuring New York Harbor and the Statute of Liberty.

While politicians, engineers and corporate executives battled for HDTV supremacy on the east coast, Woo Paik, an engineer at the California-based cable converter company General Instrument (GI), was charged with developing a digital high-definition signal for satellite TV. In about a year Paik and his team succeeded in compressing the Tom Cruise action film "Top Gun" so it could be digitally transmitted. On May 31, 1990, after additional work, the tiny GI publicly demonstrated its digital HDTV DigiCipher converter, catching the FCC and the entire industry off-guard. In February 1991, GI and MIT formed a separate partnership to develop a progressive scan digital HDTV system.

Wiley announced that the ATTC would begin physical evaluations of the contending HDTV systems. These tests, which lasted eight weeks for each system, began in July 1991 with RCA's analog "enhanced" ACTV system. NHK's Narrow MUSE was next, followed by GI with the first complete digital high-definition television system, a 1050-line interlaced system, complete with a transmission system built by Paik, which worked to near perfection. Both GI and Zenith-Bell Labs held successful public demos after their ATTC tests. In June 1992, the RCA-Philips consortium's ATRC system was tested by the ATTC, and in August 1992, the combined GI-MIT system, a 787.5-line progressive scan system was submitted for testing.

After evaluating all the results, Wiley decided that none of the systems measured up. Wiley figured that the best strategy was to take the finest ideas from the most ingenious minds in the leading companies to create the ultimate HDTV solution. After some cajoling by Wiley, on May 24, 1993, Wiley forged all the major HDTV players into a group effort dubbed the "Grand Alliance." AT&T and GI would construct the compression encoder; Sarnoff would build the "transport," which organized the digital bit-stream; Philips would build the TV set decoders and Zenith the transmission system. The emerging MPEG 2 digital video standard was mandated as the compression standard, Dolby Digital (AC-3) was picked as the HDTV audio standard, and 8-VSB (8-level Vestige Side Band) was chosen as the transmission standard.

By this time, it began to dawn on broadcasters that their successful call for HDTV had committed them to billions of dollars of infrastructure rebuilding. Over the following years, broadcasters started to stall on upgrading to HDTV. At the same time, Congress decided to auction off spectrum, rather than simply licensing it to purely commercial interests.

Another hurdle appeared in mid-1994 when proponents of a new modulation scheme called COFDM – Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing challenged 8-VSB. But after some tests, 8-VSB remained the standard.

There were more challenges to the Grand Alliance throughout 1994 and into early 1995. The PC industry complained about interlacing and demanded a progressive scan HDTV standard. Broadcasters continued to complain about the costs of building new transmission towers. Cable providers complained about "must-carry" rules that would force them to carry both the analog and the new digital channels at the same time. And Hollywood directors complained that the widescreen 16:9 standard would still mean their films would have to be cropped or require letterboxing.

By September 1995, there had been several successful transmission field tests in Charlotte, N.C. In December, Zenith announced that 8-VSB was finished, Dolby announced AC-3 was done, and Sarnoff indicated its transport was completed. GI and Bell Labs finished the decoder. In mid-April, the ATTC began its evaluation of the two finished digital formats, a 1080-line interlaced system and a 720-line progressive scan system, both now officially adopted as the ATSC Digital Television Standard.

A week later, the FCC opened proceedings for comments on the proposal. Wiley asked the ATSC to come up with lower resolution 480i and 480p "standard definition" formats in both 4:3 and 16:9. These additional standards brought the final total to 18 separate digital television formats, which were adopted by the ATSC on September 15. In its final official meeting on Nov. 28, ACATS officially adopted the Grand Alliance standard. On December 12, the FCC finally opened hearings on the standard.

In the meantime, more and more members of Congress latched onto the idea of auctioning spectrum. But this idea was thwarted when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1995 on February 2, 1996. It was the first update of the country's telecommunications laws in 60 years and, eventually and controversially, gave broadcasters free spectrum for HDTV.

On June 17, 1996, WRAL, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, North Carolina, applied for and received the first ATSC HDTV license. But the honor of the nation's first commercial HDTV broadcast went to WRC, an NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., when it began HDTV transmissions on WHD-TV, channel 34 in August 1996. Except the only TV initially capable of receiving the broadcasts was in the station manager's office.

Throughout the rest of the summer, debate continued on the ATSC standard. On November 25, 1996, the broadcast, consumer electronics industry and the PC industry reached an agreement and urged the FCC to adopt the ATSC standards. On Christmas Eve 1996, nine years after the formation of ACATS, the FCC finally adopted the ATSC standard.

In January 1998, TV manufacturers showed off the first HDTVs at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). By September, the first HDTV sets, from Mitsubishi and Panasonic, reached stores – just in time for the first HDTV network broadcasts, due to begin November 1. CBS was ahead of schedule when, on October 29, it broadcast the launch of the John Glenn space shuttle mission. Twenty-three local stations around the country began HDTV broadcasts Sunday morning, November 1, 1998. Network HDTV broadcasting was inaugurated that evening on ABC with the movie, "101 Dalmatians" on "The Wonderful World of Disney". The following weeks saw myriad HDTV broadcasting firsts. CBS broadcast the first HDTV NFL game, the New York Jets versus the Buffalo Bills, on November 8. PBS broadcast its first HDTV program. The first regular season series HDTV broadcast was CBS's "Chicago Hope" on November 18.

But the broadcasters didn't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to pump out programming if no one had sets to watch them on. And consumers would only buy sets if there were something to watch. On May 9, 1999, to break this Catch-22, Mitsubishi announced it would sponsor CBS's primetime HDTV schedule starting in the fall of that year. Three weeks later, Panasonic announced it would loan ABC HDTV gear so the network could broadcast Monday Night Football games and Super Bowl XXXIV in HD. This started a trend in manufacturer-sponsored network HDTV fare that still continues as the transition to digital broadcast continues.

Even with hardware manufacturing backing, not all local broadcasters wanted to upgrade to HDTV and looked for ways to derail the ATSC standard. In mid-1999, Sinclair, a 59-station broadcast group based in Baltimore, again challenged 8-VSB modulation and asked the FCC to allow broadcasting using COFDM instead. During the summer of 1999, Sinclair held a series of demonstrations to illustrate the superiority of COFDM. Sinclair complained that 8-VSB was prone to "multipath distortion" – the tendency of an HDTV signal in a heavy urban area to bounce off buildings and create double images. Sinclair insisted that COFDM was not prone to these problems.

On September 30, after a series of tests, the FCC once again sided with 8-VSB. But Sinclair didn't accept the FCC findings. In the fall of 1999, Sinclair and nearly half of all the nation's public and commercial stations petitioned the FCC to revise the ATSC standard. Over the next year, wrangling between broadcasters and the FCC continued. On January 19, 2001, the FCC reaffirmed 8-VSB once, for all and forever. The commission also eased the cable "must carry" complaint by not requiring cable operators to carry both analog and digital broadcasts from a single station.

The COFDM debate was the last major organized attempt to derail the transition to digital television, but problems still remained. In early 2000, CEA and the cable industry reached an agreement on delivering HDTV via cable. In May 2001, the one millionth digital television was sold.

On December 19, 2002, one of the final HDTV technical hurdles was surmounted. TV makers and cable operators agreed on a set of "plug-and-play" specifications, including the use of FireWire and DVI connectivity that will make all digital televisions HDTV cable compatible. The first of these HDTV cable-compatible sets reached stores in late 2003. The first HDTVs equipped with the new digital HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface), which carried both digital audio and digital video signals in a single USB-like cable, became available in 2004.