DVB Project Office on HDTV Compatibility with DVB-T Terrestrial Standard

Dear Mr Cripps,

You will be receiving by post our DVB info pack containing a lot of background information on the work of the Project and the progress we have achieved since we began formally a couple of years ago.

We now have Specifications (and in many cases full Standards) for the transport of MPEG-2 signals by satellite, cable, terrestrial, MMDS and SMATV transmission media. In all cases our approach has been to specify only the delivery mechanisms for the MPEG-2 Transport Stream packets, and in no way to constrain a would-be user over the contents of those packets.

Hence it would not surprise us to find one user of the DVB-T terrestrial specification applying the useful capacity of approaching 20 Mbit/s for the carriage of 4 TV programmes and their ancillary signals such as Conditional Access messages and Electronic Programme guides, and another conveying a single HDTV service.

The project has always been keen to accomodate the needs of the market place and our technical specifications have been constructed to meet concrete requirements defined by the DVB commercial modules, and not the hopes and dreams of sometimes over-optimistic engineers.

I feel that at the moment it is rather unlikely that many entrepreneurs would intend to launch HDTV services intended for the general public in the present economic climate and with the cost of HDTV display receivers being still rather unaffordable. There may be some who are planning professional applications of HDTV such as Business TV, but I have no personal knowledge of whether this is so.

I would be happy to answer your further questions when you have had a chance to study our info pack.

Kind regards,

Ed Wilson
DVB Project Office

Edgar J Wilson
European Broadcasting Union, Case Postale 67,17A Ancienne Route,
CH-1218 Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland. Phone +41 22 717 2733 Fax +41 22 717 2462