hile the Baltimore tea party rebels are led off in handcuffs (Biff !), DVB-S DBS is reaching saturation worldwide (Bam !)
Motorola bought GI and the ATSC satellite standard was released (Pow!)
- a vast array of services based on DVB-S, DVB-C and DVB-T are coming on-line.
This is going to give Europeans a continuous service platform from Spain to Helsinki, Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads, from Cable to Satellite to Terrestrial media. Watch out - DVB and the UMTS 3rd Generation mobile telephone standards are planning to interoperate.
With Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Singapore and India also aiming to have the same interoperable environment for digital television media, now even perhaps Brazil, and possibly China, the US is starting to look even more like an enclave of destructively incompatible standards. All is not lost however, as most Americans seem to be gravitating towards DBS and Cable, and the OpenCable standard specifies DVB-C, DVB-RC and perhaps even DVB-SI (Does anyone know what the facts are about Service Information in the Cablelabs standard?). Note also that Echostar (a DVB-S user) is challenging the legality of some interesting applications of the DirecTV proprietary format in the US, and that DirecTV Japan uses DVB-S... Converged services in Europe are beginning to take advantage of digital transmission and standardised service information, and there are a host of DVB standards enabling this, for repurposing content, copy protecting it, inserting interactive applications, allowing conditional access streams to interoperate, enabling return channels via all known network protocols. DVB has standards for Network Independent Protocols. All this is becoming a reality, independent of Satellite, Cable or Terrestrial forward channel physical layer.
That's why a consumer receiver could be used to receive services in moving trams in Amsterdam at IBC last year. With about three weeks notice. That's what allowed DVB's Peter MacAvock to build and define his own service in a week for IBC. Parts of the services shown on the tram screens were coming in realtime off a clear DVB satellite news feed. They were not decoded until they arrived in the tram. Peter inserted subtitling streams which were uploaded from the RAI floor. Add some advertising and you would have a very commercial service for the Amsterdam transport company. They said so.
COFDM is only a tiny little bit of what DVB represents. It's the freedom to define services independently of scanning format and delivery medium. The Grand IPR Alliance for Digital Terrestrial TV represents the old way of thinking about IPR, while DVB represents 21st century thinking. COFDM would have been a good incorporation to ATSC because it would have made ATSC more competitive! IMHO the contrbutors of intellectual property to DVB standards like the ATSC IPR holders are not going to make a cent off their IPR. However, thanks to their involvement in DVB, these companies are on the leading edge. They have a headstart on the level playing field. That sort of "sacrifice" has enabled their markets.
Interestingly enough DVB-T's COFDM was designed to be complimentary to, not competitive with DAB. The mobile reception functionality is in fact an undocumented feature. This feature makes it super-competitive with DAB, when DAB is considered as nothing more than a pipe, the DVB pipe is simply bigger. Commercial requirements for DVB-T specifically excluded mobile reception (although they insisted on portable reception). The difference is profound: portable is when you can take a battery powered set on a picnic in a city park. Mobile is when you can roller skate through that park watching TV. If something absorbing catches your eye, you will do what GSM users most naturally do when they receive a call. Stop and hang about in one place for a while.
Without suggesting you tell the FCC how much you need to watch Seinfeld while you roller skate through central park, perhaps we should consider one obvious fact from the world of telecoms: mobile devices will no longer be made with less functionality than a cell phone. They will always have a back channel. Maybe the video will only be used on demand. 2 Mb/s makes a healthy bitpipe for next generation streaming media. This could be a vast array of services. Perhaps by the time everyone has a "Watchman", CNN will be running a realtime streaming version of its core service...
In DVB-T demos in December 1997, a Seven Network van received crystal clear widescreen images with a commercial decoder in an area where GSM coverage was impossible. DVB-T has been found to deliver 12 Mb/s to moving receivers (Reimers in Germany), and about 4Mb/s to a car moving at 300 km/h (RTL tests).
In the Baltimore Tea Party the arguments were about the physical layer. Makes a change from the arguments about the scanning format. When this physical layer becomes a stable base, services can begin to be discussed. This is where the service information layer enables service packaging delivery and sales in the domain of multiplexing programs, scaling services and playing around with the elementary streams, including IP- tunnelled streams carrying web pages or anything.
The FCC thinks of the 1600 digital bands as being channels, either FTA or Pay-TV. They have contemplated only two business models: free-to-air (advertising driven) and subscription (Pay-TV) - what about Interactive TV which could mix either of these models in in or be 100% transactional with free access?
Full, international mobility of services, following roaming models, could be an interesting future, if everyone were to be using common standards. Some people have accused me of being a Stalinist about digital standards, or being a utopian communist. Utopian maybe. Looking at the gold in them thar' services - surely not communist!
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