Monday March 23, 2009 – Myra Moore
A lively panel discussion of TV manufacturers that took place at the DVB World conference on March 10 put a hot light on the subject of standards and their limitations. Even if you specify a TV or a set-top box to comply with the world’s most frequently used transmission standards – say DVB and its multiple iterations – you can easily end up with receivers that can only work in a single territory. Despite all our talk about a global marketplace, there aren’t any truly international digital TV standards. A little DVB here, a little ATSC there and some T-DMB peppered around the world and you have a big pot of DTV gumbo.
But when you have a large region, such as Europe, where every digital terrestrial broadcasting country on the continent uses the same DVB-T standard, even those receivers can vary wildly depending upon the audio and video compression standards used, the presence and type of middleware, or the presence of a smart card reader if pay services are available (just to name a few options). Standards don’t quite live up to their promise when the set-top box you bought for use in Germany can’t fully function in Norway. Most consumers tend to take this in stride – it’s called conditioning.
But TV and STB makers get the vapors when every country rolls out its own interpretation of the “standard”. It requires manufacturers to make STBs and TVs that are different from the ones it built for that country’s neighbor. This is a rational complaint as it is a costly and inefficient practice. This is the point the TV makers made at DVB World and many attendees (including broadcasters that foster this practice when they specify DTT systems) had some sympathy for their plight.
Sympathy doesn’t really matter, however. Most agree that standards that allow some flexibility – which enable innovation and experimentation – are preferable to those that lock down every element in a system. TV makers will apparently continue to pay the price for flexibility. Perhaps hosting a lavish retreat where all DTV system decision makers get together and agree on common specifications for receivers would be a good investment for the world’s TV manufacturers (ignoring possible anti-trust issues for a moment). But in today’s climate where luxury perks are about as popular as credit default swaps at a support group for embattled investors, maybe cross-country cooperation will have to wait.
