Tag: Digital TV
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MPEG Requests Comments, Further Evidence on Royalty-Free Standard
MPEG has issued a request for comments and a call for further evidence on a royalty-free video codec standard under consideration. The request is contained in the publicly available meeting resolutions of the October 2010 94th Meeting in Guangzhou, China. The request follows responses received at the October Guanghzou meeting to the previous August call…
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MPEG Issues Resolution on Type-1 (Royalty-Free) Standardization
MPEG — Working Group 11 of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 — has issued a resolution seeking active participation in developing a Type-1 (royalty-free) video coding standard. “Given that there is a desire for using royalty free video coding technologies for some applications such as video distribution over the Internet, MPEG wishes to enquire of National…
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Gateway To Nowhere: Standards-Bashing Won’t Fix Set Top Gridlock
Standards “would thwart, not advance, innovation” and “entail crippling delays” because they are “extremely time consuming, often divisive, and sometimes used by one faction to block the progress of another or to promote its own intellectual property portfolio”. It would be easy to dismiss comments like these in the Cable industry’s latest response to the…
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DTG Group Challenges Semi-Open Stance of Project Canvas
Last August I questioned if the BBC-led hybrid DTV Project Canvas was “seduced by the cynical allure of a semi-open ‘standards-based open environment‘” . Many kudos to the DTG — the lead UK DTV standards group — who today released its tough-love “parallel process” criticism in the BBC Trust oversight consultation. To wit: “it is…
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Don’t Quit – Evolve! ATSC Forum to Close Doors
Last week, Business News Americas broke the story that the ATSC Forum — the industry group that lobbies for the international adoption of the US ATSC digital TV standard of the Advanced Television Systems Committee — plans to close its doors at the end of September. Although the ATSC Forum’s closure has gotten little attention…
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Broadcasters Challenge Broadband TV Patent Submarine Threat
I’ve pointed out how the EBU, the world’s largest organization of national broadcasters, is beating the drum to avoid patent lock-ins in new standards for hybrid broadcast-broadband TV services. EBU’s own write-up of last week’s EBU/ETSI workshop is even more direct: “Broadcasters are haunted by the ghosts of the submarine patents which emerged with MHP…
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Patent Dumping For Democracy: Reconsidering America’s DTV Diplomacy
“More Democratic” … “It is a matter of social justice” So US ambassadors have lobbied South American governments since 2007 that “[t]he issue is whether the government will choose the [ATSC] digital television standard that is already providing the highest quality, lowest cost, and most democratic opportunities …” In recent months Peru, Argentina, and now…
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“Conflict Through Consensus”: Europe’s Hybrid Broadbanders Paint on UK’s Project Canvas
A “Julius Stonian” observation: standards groups aren’t “consensus organizations”, they are political organizations. Winners declare their way the “consensus”, and changes in political context shift the “consensus”. So reflects calls in several slides at yesterday’s Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband (HBB) workshop to look deeper into Intellectual Property Rights and other control points in the new “broadcast+broadband” (aka…
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Hybrid TV: The Way Forward?
At the 2009 Brazil SET Broadcasting & Cable Conference I presented on 3 panel topics: “DTV Patent Pools: What’s Wrong & How to Fix It“ “Conformance & Certification: Key to Digital Switch Over“ “Hybrid TV, The Way Forward?“(pdf) The overall theme that Brazil has become a world DTV leader was picked up in the Brazil…
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“Trust But Verify”: IPR & BBC’s Project Canvas
I have filed comments in the UK Project Canvas public consultation. To catch up on the UK context with global implications, watch James Murdock’s mesmerizing anti-BBC screed, and say… “This is the BBC.” Perhaps no other single phrase has broadcast more meaning to more people in the great call to communicate that has gripped our…