Tuesday,
March 26, 2013 – Jing Sui
How do
broadcasters keep up with the rapid-fire changes in media delivery? Many are adopting or rolling out the next
generation of the most widely adopted digital terrestrial TV (DTT) standard – DVB-T. The DVB-T2 standard has established itself as
the most efficient DTT standard, which greatly improves power consumption and
spectrum use. Broadcasters will need
more ammunition in their arsenals than improved efficiency to keep up with
demand for delivery at any time on any device. That, however is a different
topic that we periodically address here.
Thanks
to more frequent analogue switch-offs and increasing spectrum scarcity, DVB-T2 is being widely slated for next-generation
broadcast transmissions with the ability to provide a minimum 30% in increased
capacity over DVB-T. The standard was first published in 2009, and the update, T2-Lite
for mobile and portable reception, was added in 2011. In countries where DVB-T
services already exist, DVB-T and DVB-T2 services are likely to co-exist for a long
period of time. As a contrast, in countries that have not yet deployed DTT
services, many will leap directly to DVB-T2 instead of first deploying DVB-T.
(The exception is Latin America where most countries have followed in the
footsteps of Brazil by adopting the ISDB-T standard).
Many
countries have already implemented the DVB-T2 standard. A number of European
countries such as Italy, Sweden, and Finland launched DVB-T2 services during
2010 and 2011. UK is the first country to deploy DVB-T2 and it’s being used to
sell HD OTA programming. Outside of Europe, Nigeria, Kenya, Serbia and many
more countries, are expected to follow soon. DVB-T2 trials are also currently
taking place all over the globe; more and more countries are considering DVB-T2
services.
