Twelve international broadcasting bodies including the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) founded the landmark Future of Broadcast Television (FOBTV) initiative at the recent NAB2012 Show in Las Vegas. This was a defining moment for the terrestrial television broadcast industry.
From black and white to colour and from analogue to digital, television technology has undergone revolutionary changes.
In the analogue age, colour television technology was fragmented into three major systems (PAL, NTSC and SECAM, with many subvariations).
In the digital age, the splintering has continued across the globe with multiple, separately developed digital systems. While television has prospered, it has not been possible for the world to take full advantage of the convenience and economies of scale of a single broadcast standard.
Terrestrial broadcasting is uniquely important because it is wireless (supports receivers that can move); infinitely scalable (point-to-multipoint and one-to-many architecture); local (capable of delivering geographically local content); timely (provides real time and non-real time delivery of content); and flexible (supports free-to-air and subscription services). The attributes of wireless delivery of media content to a potentially unlimited number of receivers makes terrestrial broadcasting a vital technology all over the world. Broadcasting is, in fact, the most spectrum-efficient wireless delivery means for popular real-time and file-based media content.
Today, technological innovation may be able to break down many of the longstanding barriers that have prevented common systems. This could enable removing the gaps between the different television signal formats and transmission systems used around the world. The 21st century is an era of integration of broadcasting, Internet, and communications, all of which have evolved in parallel.
Consumers are calling for more convenient and user-friendly services and the development of digital technology opens the possibility of cooperation among all the different networks and transmission systems.
Digital TV framework
The FOBTV initiative builds on last November’s Future of Broadcast TV Summit, in Shanghai, China, where broadcast leaders formed a framework for the evolution of digital terrestrial television. The new Memorandum of Understanding sets out five objectives for the FOBTV initiative:
1. Develop future ecosystem models for terrestrial broadcasting taking into account business, regulatory and technical environments. The next generation of broadcast television technology has the potential to revolutionise the industry. National and local broadcasters have the expertise to employ this technology to provide high quality entertainment and news content to viewers, both fixed and on the move. The global development of a next generation system uniting broadcasters around the world should show the commitment of the broadcasting industry to embrace new technologies and leverage interest from global technology developers. The overall ecosystem that supports the television industry however is large, and success in the marketplace will necessitate holistic understanding and treatment of business and regulatory issues and environments, in addition to development of the underlying technologies.
2. Develop requirements for next generation terrestrial broadcast systems. Requirements should reflect the broadcast industry’s commitment to developing necessary technologies to create and deliver new media and information services by taking advantage of future broadcast systems. This will also take into account the need to maximise proper and efficient use of spectrum resources, as well as exchanges and cooperation among communication systems and broadcasting on both a technological and business level.
3. Foster collaboration between digital TV development laboratories. Collaboration will aid in the desire to eliminate broadcasting technological gaps and advances in broadcasting technologies should benefit both developed and developing countries.
4. Recommend major technologies that can be used as the basis for unified new standards. Full exploration of the benefits of common tool sets and interface points in the development of new digital systems and standards that can be globally supported and eventually deployed worldwide will be pursued.
5. Request standardisation of technologies by appropriate organisations, such as DVB, ATSC, ARIB and others. The group’s goal is to form consensus around basic system requirements and common technology platforms as described in the previous points above. FOBTV will request standardisation of selected technologies (layers) by appropriate standards development organisations.
EBU Technology and Development director Lieven Vermaele said: “Terrestrial broadcasting and mobile broadband are both important but neither technology alone will be able to meet future demand for wireless media. We need to innovate using them together, in a complementary way.
“Broadcast can be the backbone as it can deliver the coverage, quality of service and capacity we will increasingly need. Broadband will extend the range of services and enable access to all categories of user device.’
The other signatories are the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC); Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC); Communications Research Center (CRC); Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI); Globo TV Network; IEEE Broadcast Technology Society; National Association of Broadcasters (NAB); National Engineering Research Center of Digital TV of China (NERC-DTV); NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories; Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Brazilian Society of Television Engineering (SET).
By Ian Dormer
Screen Africa magazine – May 2012
