Various methods are used to provide three-dimensional television (3DTV) services over a terrestrial broadcasting network. However, these services cannot provide high-quality 3D content to consumers. It is because current terrestrial broadcast networks are allocated with limited bandwidths to transmit 3D content while 3D content requires larger bandwidth compared to that of 2D content. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a hybrid 3DTV broadcasting system, which utilizes both a terrestrial broadcast network and a broadband network. In the proposed system, two elementary streams of left and right views for a stereoscopic video service are transmitted over a terrestrial broadcasting network and a broadband network, respectively. In addition, the proposed system suggests a new mechanism for synchronization between these two elementary streams. The proposed scheme can provide high-quality 3DTV service regardless of bandwidth of the terrestrial broadcast network while maintaining backward compatibility with a 2D DTV broadcasting service.
