 At a minimum, all digital television broadcasters in Australia provide a 576i standard-definition service, in addition to high definition. The 576p50 format is also considered a HDTV format, as it has higher vertical resolution through the use of progressive scanning. When Australia started DVB-T in 2001 several networks broadcast high-definition in a 576p format as this could give better quality on 50 Hz scanning CRT TVs and was not as demanding on MPEG-2-bit-rate. Since many modern television sets have an interlace to progressive scan conversion there is little difference in picture quality. MPEG-2 encoders have also improved so the more conventional 720p and 1080i formats are now used.
