In the spotlight: DVB's Peter MacAvock

Mobile television is a topic attracting global attention, but not a lot of traction to speak of, yet. With two new standards for digital television, the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Project aims to expedite the market for handheld digital TV. The global industry-led consortium will demo the new standards — the DVB-SH for mobile TV and DVB-T2 for advanced digital broadcast transmission — in next-generation terrestrial TV services at the NAB Show in Las Vegas this week. DVB executive director Peter MacAvock spoke with associate news editor Sarah Reedy about what’s holding back digital TV services and what will drive them forward.

On the S-band opportunity: S-band represents an interesting opportunity as a frequency band because it is significantly less congested than the more traditional ones. From our perspective, it represents an interesting opportunity. The United States is an area where it could be interesting, but also in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa — where there may not be so much frequency congestion as regulatory pressures on the terrestrial frequency bands, and satellite bandwidth is significantly less regulated than is terrestrials. So entrepreneurs sometimes prefer to use that.

On global congestion: If I want to deliver a broadcast TV service in the Middle East, I am typically subjected to more regulatory scrutiny than might be the case in North America. If I try to deliver a mobile television service in Europe, I’m faced with the fact that, just as in the United States, the frequency bands are heavily congested with the delivery of analog as the first step, then, subsequently, digital terrestrial television, ATFC in the United States, DVB in Europe and elsewhere. That means there is no room, essentially, for new services like mobile television, so we must wait in these countries where there is this frequency congestion problem for the liberation of frequencies following analog switch-off, or exploit other opportunities like S-band…DVB has developed its handheld TV standard, DVB-H, and has been for some time, but the significance of the frequency congestion problem was something we recognized we could resolve by the addition of another technology broadly compatible with DVB-H, but specifically designed for the S-band area — hence, DVB-SH. It was a significant development within the DVB Project; it built upon a lot of work already done by DVB-H.

We are starting to see the first of the fully commercial launches of this technology. Coming so soon after the specification was finalized was certainly a surprise for us. There was a real market need to deliver handheld television, and there was a lot of interest in doing so. Using this technology, an opportunity presented itself. We really see for the first time the chip development in receivers taking place with the services being launched. Certainly, I haven’t seen it before. Services typically come after chip development.

On the promise of IPTV: IPTV is certainly a very significant force in television these days. It has generated probably more hype than its fair share over the last couple of years, but we are now starting to see deployments taking place at the very large scale that was once predicted. The difficulty with IPTV, or, if you like, the uniqueness of IPTV, is that it is a very complex offering because typically IPTV is never delivered alone, at least independent of the other triple- or quadruple-play offerings from the operators. In that environment, it is very important to try to ensure that wherever possible solutions that are developed by one standards organization, such as ourselves, can dovetail into solutions coming from other bodies. What I am particularly referring to here is that in a triple- or quadruple-play environment, you have so many different authorities in various areas of the triple-play offerings that one cannot hope to be able to provide all the solutions to all the players in all the market. What we need to do is try and ensure that we can permit multivendor support that we can ensure that the DVB solutions in IPTV will dovetail into others. For example, there is the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) organization. There is also ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions), another standards body based in the United States. All these guys are doing some work in ITPV, but they are typically approaching it from a slightly different perspective than we would. Again, interoperability is key.

The basic message is that as IPTV and the IPTV offerings become more complex, the need for multivendor support becomes greater — not less. As soon as you require multivendor support, you are into standards and there is no way around that. That is why we have to work as quickly as we can to ensure that it is made available as quickly as possible to the market. IPTV is growing hard and strong, and it is doing very well. The need for standards is not always obvious for the operators, but as soon as they seek multivendor support for whatever they do, they rapidly realize that standards are an absolute necessity. And in that environment, that is where we come in.

On the role of standards: We have a very strict approach based on open standards. From our perspective, there is a single solution available, which is an open standard — which is ours. We are working with other bodies that operate in the same space — particularly the mobile phone standardization people — in order to ensure that there are competing offerings at the service layer. If there are divergences between the different bodies at that level, we are working to address harmonizing those and doing it as fast as we can to ensure that when someone comes to launch a service, there is a set of solutions available to him or her that address their requirements. But also, they are able to get hold of multivendor solutions for that particular technology problem. We are working to try to ensure that is possible.