In this paper, we review the dramatic impact that technology has had on society and past predictions about future technology, and predict the impact of future technology. The methods with which technology affects society can be categorized into what we will call lifestyle “waves” of change. We will describe three specific types of waves and how they affect specific types of personal and home electronics. The lifestyle waves we will consider are: 1) time and place independence; 2) interactivity; and 3) integration of the physical and information worlds. We will consider how these waves influence three categories of personal and home electronics: 1) home appliances (i.e., washing machines, dishwashers, etc.); 2) audio/video products (i.e., TVs, stereos, etc.); and 3) personal electronic gadgets (i.e., mobile phones, navigational devices, etc.). These waves typically are introduced into one category of electronics and rapidly cross pollinate to all categories. We will also discuss how specific trends in technology, such as hardware, software, user interfaces, and content distribution, can generate these lifestyle waves of change. Finally, we make some predictions on how these waves and trends in technology may impact personal and home electronics in the future.

This paper intends to introduce widely the broadcasting satellite services using Digital System E of Recommendation ITU-R BO.1130. The system is designed to provide high-quality audio and multimedia and data broadcasting services to mobile receivers, handheld and vehicular. The geostationary satellite specially designed for this system was launched successfully in March 2004, followed by the inauguration of regular broadcasting services on 20 October 2004. Due to the nature of satellite broadcasting, it covers the Japanese area widely. The system also adopts complementary terrestrial on-channel repeaters for shadowed areas from the direct satellite broadcasting signal. It should be noted that the system is the world first broadcasting satellite services for handheld and vehicular receivers with high-quality audio and multimedia and data receiving capability.

This special issue of the proceedings of the IEEE presents a systematical and complete tutorial on digital television (DTV), produced by a team of DTV experts worldwide. This introductory paper puts the current DTV systems into perspective and explains the historical background and different evolution paths that each system took. The main focus is on terrestrial DTV systems, but satellite and cable DTV are also covered,as well as several other emerging services.

A new multilevel coding method that uses several error-correcting codes is proposed. The transmission symbols are constructed by combining symbols of codewords of these codes. Usually, these codes are binary error-correcting codes and have different error-correcting capabilities. For various channels, efficient systems can be obtained by choosing these codes appropriately. Encoding and decoding procedures for this method are relatively simple compared with those of other multilevel coding methods. In addition, this method makes effective use of soft-decisions to improve the performance of decoding. The decoding error probability is analyzed for multiphase modulation, and numerical comparisons to other multilevel coding systems are made. When equally complex systems are compared, the new system is superior to other multilevel coding systems.