[news] Dolby Digital chosen as standard for China's TVs, set-top boxes

Dolby Laboratories has scored a huge coup this week as the Chinese government has selected Dolby Digital Plus as the defacto standard for audio in televisions and set-top boxes throughout the country.

Essentially, that means that any brand and/or device manufacturer that wants to sell its product in a market with 400 million households and counting must go through and encode their solutions in Dolby Digital Plus.

This widens Dolby’s global footprint considerably. Dolby Digital Plus has already been adopted as a standard for HDTVs in the United Kingdom, India and France, among other markets around the world.

Dolby’s technology will be encoded into China’s national Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcasting receiver specification, already adopted by most Chinese broadcasters as well as over 50 HDTV and set-top box makers, including Huawei.

The new initiative will take effect beginning on November 1, 2011.