The EBU TECHNICAL team invites you to visit the EBU Village (stand 10.D21) at IBC 2008, to get an up to date briefing on the latest in broadcasting technology R&D being carried out by Europe’s public service broadcasters. Amongst this year's line-up are the world first broadcast of Super Hi-Vision via satellite using DVB-S2. Other demos will include Dirac video compression, DVB Copy Protection and Content Management (CPCM), and many more technologies.
It's an HD world
The EBU Village continues to celebrate the tidal wave of HDTV which is increasingly splashing into European homes. The Village will showcase content in various formats, ranging from current HDTV to 1080p/50, 1080p/300 and ultimately Super Hi-Vision. The Super Hi-Vision demo has been facilitated by a new EBU-encouraged collaboration of media laboratories from Europe and Japan.
Research
A number of other collaborative research projects are on display from teams which include Members such as the IRT, which is the European Project porTiVity which has developed a complete end-to-end platform providing Rich Media Interactive TV services for portable and mobile devices. The BBC is showing the Arena project which shows that conventional CE equipment can be used for audience measurement. The P2P-Next project will show how peer-to-peer sharing can be used in receiver set-top boxes to ease the capacity burden for AV-content streaming.
Unifying radio
Consumer Electronics equipment is no longer the bottleneck for digital radio deployment. This will be the message of the WorldDMB presence in the Village and it fits well with the EBU TECHNICAL effort on unifying digital radio standards. EBU Eurovision operations will show how the exchange network can benefit from a combination of satellite streaming and on-demand traffic.
Other booths hosted in the EBU Village will highlight the ongoing work of EBU TECHNICAL to support broadcasters' interests in areas such as the Digital Dividend debate. After all, it is all very nice to have superb good technology, but without proper rights management and spectrum availability the content may never reach the audience!