April 2013www.tvbeurope.com


TVBEurope 23 TVBEurope 1993-2013


Compression’s brave new world


By Chris Dickinson


HUNDREDS OF new niche sports, movie, entertainment, shopping and interactive television channels are likely to be set up across the world in the next few years thanks to the emergence of a new generation of digital compression transmission technology. Some of the world’s biggest


broadcasting organisations, including US cable giant TCI, broadcaster HBO and MTV owner Viacom, have already committed to the new technology.


one of the contestants in the FCC trials. Bob Zitter, HBO technology


operations vice president, says the digital compression system allows HBO to provide all of its multiplex channels on existing satellites, rather than requiring cable operators to acquire additional dishes for reception. The quality of the signals, he claims, is also improved by the digital technology. “Digital compression is another link in completing the digital chain from production to consumer.” Another US manufacturer, Scientific-Atlanta, has teamed


“Digital compression is another link in completing the digital chain from production to consumer” Bob Zitter, HBO


The engines driving the rush to this brave new world are the setting of new standards for widescreen and high definition television and the parallel development of a new breed of encoders and decoders for digitally compressing television signals. Standards bodies in the US


and elsewhere are involved in a process of defining the new transmission systems — with the FCC in Washington probably being the most systematic, assessing four systems for the next US TV standard. TCI and HBO have both signed agreements with US manufacturer General Instrument and its telecom partner AT&T for the supply of their DigiCipher system —


up with UK company National Transcommunications Ltd (NTL) to develop digital compression codecs, which — like DigiCipher — use the MPEG compression standard. In another development, Leitch Video has teamed up with telecom company OAK Communications and C-Cube Microsystems — one of the leading MPEG chip manufacturers — to develop their own MPEG-based digitally compressed codec system. A further manufacturer to


have developed a system is Sweden-based Digital Vision, which is working with a consortium of Scandinavian companies to develop a new digital HDTV standard, HD-Divine.


OMF for NAB launch Video, audio workstation vendors prepare for show By Simon Croft


THE OPEN Media Framework, a software interchange initiative launched last April by Avid Technology and about 70 manufacturers, will introduce the OMF ‘engine’ at NAB. OMF’s purpose is to allow file


interchange between digital workstations, whether the file content is video, audio, stills or other kinds of data. Avid vice president of European operations Paul Basson said, “The basic concept is divided into three layers. The first is the media layer, which has the pictures, sound and graphics. The second is the composition layer, which effects how the material is put together. It contains ‘super EDS’. At the third level, links


are retained to the original source material. We think that no company will want to commit in perpetuity to today’s compression technology.”


conversions that would otherwise be necessary. The Application Programming Interfaces will be available to third party developers to build


“We think that no company will want to commit in perpetuity to today’s compression technology” Paul Basson, Avid Technology


OMF is not a free lunch, in that there is a time penalty associated with conversion to and from the OMF standard, but Basson points out that there is only a single conversion at each end, as opposed to the numerous


other products and functions onto the engine.


Signatories to OMF include


Apple Computer, AT&T, Chyron, Digital Equipment Corporation, Eastman Kodak, Grass Valley, Rank Cintel and Silicon Graphics.


Montreux Symposium to highlight HDTV, digital TV By Fergal Ringrose


HDTV, DIGITAL television and multimedia will take centre stage at the Montreux ITS this June. The opening session of the Forum will be ‘HDTV Production: New Panoramas in Creativity’, chaired by directors Paul Kafno from HD Thames


and Michael Gelinas of CBC. Then Robert Lambert of the


Walt Disney Studios and William Connolly from Sony Pictures Entertainment will chair ‘High Definition in Cinema Production’, with examples of HD tape-to-film conversion for cinema exhibition. George Vradenburg, executive vice


president of 20th Century Fox, and the Financial Times’ Ray Snoddy will host ‘HDTV Strategies and Economies — the View from Three Continents’. Contributors to this session will be French National Assembly deputy Michel Pelchat, former FCC chairman Al Sikes and NTL’s John Forrest.


ZDF takes Ikegami cameras for ‘future-proof’ features By Kevin Hilton


ZWEITES DEUTSHES Fernsehen, the second German television channel, began a major upgrade of its studio and outside broadcast cameras in February this year. The station will be re-equipping with between 35 and 40 Ikegami


HK-355 and HK-355P units for both fixed and portable use. Comparative tests were undertaken by ZDF project engineer Dieter Vey and maintenance engineer Dieter Decker. “The main reason for going for Ikegami is that is a camera that has most of the features on the market,”


pixels per line, which is only offered by Ikegami and Sony. We did tests with standardised cameras but we have asked for additional features,” he said.


explained Decker. Specific points that interested the ZDF team were skin detail, detail correction and good signal-to-noise ratio. “We were looking for 1,000


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