The Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) 47th General Assembly in Tokyo has as one of its major themes the 'Resilience of Broadcasting'. The idea is to underline the need for broadcasters to share their knowledge in facing the many changes in the rapidly changing media industry.
Technical work
The seven-day ABU event taking place this week features three initial days of ABU Technical Committee meetings, the ABU's senior elected technical body, organized by Sharad Sandu, Director of the ABU Technical Department, and his team at ABU Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur. The ABU Assembly also has an Awards session, to credit outstanding contributions to the media industry. The ABU Excellence Award for Broadcast Engineering this year goest to Dr. Abdolali Aliaskary of the Iranian broadcaster IRIB.
Challenges
The ABU's technical work overlaps to a large extend with the EBU's key topics, such as coping with rapid equipment replacement cycles, cost constraints, spectrum issues, and the positioning of new technical developments such as 3D-TV and UHDTV. But there are differences too. The ABU's wide catchment area, for example, means four different digital terrestrial television broadcasting (DTT) standards. The climatic zone also calls for more emphasis on emergency warning broadasting systems.
EBU - ABU
According to EBU TECHNICAL Director Lieven Vermaele, who attends the event, the common and complementary topics that the ABU and the EBU address make them ideal partners. "We have always had a good relationship with our sister Union, and we both have the intention to make it even stronger in the future. The ABU brings professional dedication, wisdom and eagerness to help fellow broadcasters with the challenges they face. We can add to and benefit from that in our EBU technical work.", he commented. For more information on this topic, contact: David Wood (EBU) .