Seven new members for MHEG association

IMPALA, the International MHEG Promotion Alliance, today announced seven new supporter members: Finlux, Freeview (New Zealand free-to-air consortium), Hitachi, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and TopUp TV.

“We are delighted that IMPALA has already gained such recognition within the marketplace. With companies of this calibre offering their support to MHEG-5 further uptake is guaranteed,” said David Cutts, Managing Director, Strategy & Technology (S&T), in a prepared statement.

Steve Browning, General Manager of Freeview in New Zealand, added, “Freeview New Zealand has taken its lead from the successful Freeview UK platform in its business structure, brand positioning, and a number of technology decisions. It made sense for us to go with a cost-effect and proven open standard middleware platform for interactive broadcast applications.”

Originally developed and standardised by ISO in the mid-1990s as part of the DAVIC standardisation effort to support interactivity and navigation for video-on-demand services, MHEG-5 has achieved significant success on the UK’s Freeview DVB-T platform with over 14 million receivers deployed using UK Profile 1. The latest version is also an ETSI standard.

Mark Londero, General Manager, Technical Planning Sony TV Operations Europe, adds, “MHEG-5 is one of the core technologies embedded in all our TV sets sold in the European region, even though so far it has only been adopted in the UK. Our motivation for supporting IMPALA is to see the expansion of broadcast support for MHEG-5 in Europe and beyond. There is the alternative MHP but that is much more processor and memory intensive and has yet to demonstrate any clear user benefit over MHEG.”

The founder members of IMPALA are Strategy & Technology (S&T), Cabot Communications and EchoStar Europe.