What makes digital broadcast transmission (like over-the-air TV) need less power (as little as 25%) to cover the same area as the previous analog transmitter?
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Fundamentally the reason is that digital video can be compressed to use lower bandwidth than analogue video. Digital compression is very advanced whereas analogue signals are essentially uncompressed, unless you count interlacing and chroma subsampling. So you can send several video streams, some in high definition, on the same channel that used to support a single standard-definition channel, and do it with less power. Because the great majority of video frames are almost exactly the same as the frame before, and pixels are mostly the same as their neighbouring pixels, yet analogue TV takes no advantage of that.
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