The Panel Beating Session

"What is the biggest challenge for consumer electronics?"

The end of day panel session, Chaired by Phil Laven, with John Adam, Renaud Di Francesco, and Andreas Schumann, tried to identify the biggest challenges facing the consumer electronics industry today.

Surprise, surprise.  It is the growing multiplicity of different standards.  Manufacturers like international standards.   Human beings seem to find it easier to choose national standards.  Why?    Lack of knowledge (of the work in standards bodies) was one explanation.    Because Europeans are not very ‘European’ was another – or very ‘world orientated’.  ( In fact, its even quite difficult to get a common system for Geneva, isn’t it?).

John Adam cited the strong line taken by the CSA in France where a given standard and timescale was defined, as an example to be followed.  The UK’s ‘wishy washy’ approach to standards actually didn’t help.  Renaud offered the enigma :  “If France has been able to catch up, it’s because it was behind”.   Anyone know what it meant?

Phil Laven pointed out the contradiction that the CSA firmness was actually contrary to principles of free trade….

There were ideas for helping the situation:  DVB standards (like DVB-T2) should have fewer options.   Receivers should be modular to allow upgrades.    My comment:  are these ideas for only easing the symptons, rather than curing the illness?

John Adam suggested that (my hypothesis) the ‘illness’ might be the way the DVB prepares its specifications as ‘toolkits’.

My comment:  to misquote Shakespeare;  the fault, dear DVB , is probably in ourselves, not in our stars….

I imagine that if you do have the formula for reducing multiplicity, please say. You may get your DVB subscription waived…?

Let’s use each other’s toyboxes.

Ivan Verbesselt from Nagravision  gave a presentation on that ‘H’ word.    What could ‘convergence’ and ‘hybrid’ bring?  Help the home ‘fine mess’?   Yes.   In both the fixed and mobile worlds, Ivan saw the same on-coming train – combining broadcast and IP services.   A blurred TV eco-system.   “Finally everyone is going to be using everyone else toybox”.     We will need to use an ‘opportunistic network mix’,  an opportunistic device mix, and an opportunistic content mix.

Two major elements will define the future world – metadata which tells defines the platform, and content management across platforms.   Ivan pointed out that the hybrid dream is seriously in danger..largely because of the broadband world’s standard’s ‘jungle’.   A particular jungle is multi device content propagation tools.  DVB-CPCM is one standard but there are many alternatives.  There are many industrial interests which are are acting against it.

As many have said:  hybrid is a must, but can it be made succesful in the face of the broadband standards’ jungle?      There is a big job to do.  Who should do it?

Cable Nets of the Future

Dirk Jaeger,  from the Technical University of Braunschweig, took on the role of guru to examine the future of the cable industry.    He outlined a partially funded EU project – ReDeSign – intended to see what could be ‘next generation’ cable networks.

Some of the findings – largely service requirements – were as follows.

Cable operators do not plan to switch off their analogue services quickly, but the number may fall by about 50% over the next ten years (whatever happened to fast track ‘Internet’ time scales?).

In ten years, what is more,  50% of services will, the study shows,  be HDTV.    Comment: Manufacturers say that SDTV production equipment will be unavaillable except at premium costs many years before that – so SDTV will be expensive to make in ten year’s time?.

Bandwidth capacity demand for IP services will continue to grow up to and beyond the capacity of HFC.   Question:  So why do governments even bother with wireless broadband in the UHF band, which will be a lot more limited than HFC?

Good presentation – showing even more value for DVB-C2……

DVB-C2 brings gains and comes at the right time.

Lorenz Glatz picked up the baton from Christoph Schaaf explaining how DVB-C2 might be implemented and rolled out by Kabel Deutschland.   DVB-C2  allows an increase in capacity without massive investment and is therefore very attractive.   The system has many strengths, though to bring the high capacity gain it could not be made backwards compatible with DVB-C.  DVB-C2 receivers with decode DVB-C, and so the migration of existing services to DVB-C2 will take a long time.   Set top Box lifetime is typically 3-5 years, so this has to be taken into account.

The good news is that cable networks anyway need to introduce new elements such as HDTV,  MPEG4, and VOD, so the availability of DVB-C2 is a ‘happy’ (or is it planned) coincidence, since the STBs will anyway need to be changed.   Combining C2 and MPEG4 produces a whopping efficiency gain.

It seems all good news ….but why is analogue cable so slow in disappearing?

Digital Cable takes a major step forward

Christoph Schaaf is one of the longest serving members of the DVB project, associated with cable systems since the beginning of the project.    He explained the background to and details of the DVB-C2 system.    The new system gains over 60% in capacity for the same channel capacity.  One of the new tricks is to use OFDM.  It also has flexible channel bandwidths, so it should make cable delivery even more efficient.   Most of procesing stages are chosen to be the same as those for DVB-T and DVB-S.   The system can include ‘PLPs’ which allow different prioity data streams to be delivered.   The data streams can include broadband services.    There are a whole renge of improvements associated with C2.    The specification should be published shortly.   What kind of use and roll out could we expect?

Welcome Peter Seibert to the house of fun.

The Cable Session begins with the future Executive Director of the DVB Project Office, Peter Siebert.   He examined the cable situation.   Peter reminded us that while DVB-C has been around for about 11 years, today over 75% of cable connections in Europe are still analogue.    We are on the threshold of the DVB-C2 system which will be the most advanced in the world.

HBB – initials to remember

Former DVB Project Director, now with the EBU, gave a presentation on this critical media trend – Hybrid Broadcast Broadband.    The basic idea is to combine broadcast and broadband on a single TV screen in a way which is easy to use.  Many speakers have touched on this concept, and the fact that they have is actually the problem.   We seem to he heading towards an HBB world of multiple standards – which will not help the consumer or market take up.   Peter MacAvock is working in the EBU to try to converge the technology options.

Peter explained that in the UK, the BBC assisted by ITV and BT are developing a system termed CANVAS.   In France a system H4TV is in development.   The Open IPTV Forum is working on a third option.   In addition, Intel and Yahoo have developed a system ‘TVWidget’.    There may be more in the pipeline from other ‘Internet Blue Chip Companies’.     There is more risk of multiplicity because different ETSI groups appear to have overlapping remits.

A Panel worth listening to

Well,  it is going to be tough.  Can it be done?

CPCM and DRM are different animals – no really.

Ted Shapiro, well known DVB participant from the MPA,  gave a presentation on protecting content – CPCM.  OK, I suppose this is a bit different to DRM, but it is close.

“CPCM is meant to make life easier”.  But I wonder if teenagers like Sebastian from yesterday know this?

“The music industry is backing off DRM.  We are not”.   But who is the ‘we?’.

“There is no technology that can solve all the (protection) problems”.   Let’s all say Amen to that.

“Many people think the French copy protection laws (for Internet content) serve no purpose” .   Does Mr Sarkozy know?

“I was the only lawyer at the CPCM meetings”.   So, (apologies in advance for prejudicial remark) how come it all took so =&%! ” long?

“European copyright regulation has been harmonized in 27 different ways”.     Only conclusion:  invest heavily in law firms?

“We need compliance and robustness rules – trust me”    Sure we do.

Overall a thoughtful presentation covering an important area.

What do you think?

Television has a future?

Njaal Borch from Norut, with an easy manner and a red pullover,  had the modest  subject ‘the future of television’ for his presentation.    Njaal suggested that we are moving to a world where ‘the on line self is the real self’.   Frightening for one in the process of writing a blog, n’est pas?.    Will I soon become David Blog?   Njaal aslo suggested that ’sports’ programmes could be the ‘final frontier of broadcasting’.  Remind me to use that analogy myself.    One interesting point was that for many people television is just ‘ambiance’ or ‘company’.  In this case they need no video on demand or personalisation.

So, ‘real’ broadcasting only has a future as background noise to stop us feeling lonely?  Are you as depressed as me?

And now the other way round…

Can TV become a ‘pull’ system?   The second presenter, Bernard Collini-Nocker, looked at providing IP content over broadcast channels.   Can users ‘participate’ in ‘broadcast channels by uploading their content?  Sound a bit like YouTube live over a TV station?   It can be  ‘user participation’ in the process of TV productions.   Why not just use the Internet for this?   Answer from Mr Collini-Nocker:  because this is not an efficient way to serve a large number of people at the same time.   There may also be good reason to provide information via broadcast channels such as disater information.      How about using ‘opportunistic data’?

Do you think this is a practical approach?