As every year, the EBU, its Members and related projects joined forces and demoed their technical activities in the EBU Village at IBC. Without doubt this year's major attractors were the HDTV demonstrations in the EBU Theatre.
HDTV
Helped by a strong interest in the topic of High Definition in the conference sessions and daily press, EBU staff were overwhelmed with visitors showing interest in the different HD formats and compression schemes.
EBU Project Groups
Information on some of the EBU Project Groups was presented in the 'Technical Committee corner'. This included:
- the P/AS report (access services)
- an announcement from P/MAG (metadata)
- a snapshot of the P/MDP work (middleware)
- EBU spectrum planning software for the ITU
- PMC Seminar 2005 announcement.
Visitors could also sample a number of MHP applications from ARD, ZDF, the RAI and YLE.
European projects
Many EBU Members cooperate in the European Union's IST Projects. The EBU Village welcomed three of them:
- GMFiTV
- MeciTV
- Savant
Presentations of simple to quite complex technological achievements were provided.
DVB-H and DAB
Visitors to the EBU Village had the unique opportunity to see two of the alternative solutions to broadcasting to handheld receivers. DVB-H was available on air in Amsterdam, and visitors to DigiTAG could see it received live via a Nokia 'clamshell' DVB-H receiver. A metre away they could see the DAB method, DMB, via a PDA via a transmitter in the booth. Both gave excellent and uncorruptable picture and sound quality.