Receiver manufacturer Humax has said it is the first such company to pass the Freeview Playback Group 2 standards. Freeview Playback is the digital video recorder standard being introduced for DTT in the UK. The Digital TV Group is overseeing the feature sets that have been divided into groups. Humax says that both its PVR-9200TB [...]
Ukraine awards DTT licence
August 3, 2007 05.46 Europe/London By
RRT Concern has announced the results of a DTT tender in Ukraine. According to information provided by EEBC, the right to operate a single frequency network (SFN) employing MPEG-4 compression in Kiev and Zhitomyr has been won by Kwant-Efir. A total of five companies took part in the bidding process.
Italy resolves digital dividend
August 2, 2007 19.07 Europe/London By
Italy’s digital television bill has moved forward another step after two parliamentary committees approved proposals on how the country’s digital dividend should be allocated. Article 3 of the legislation covers what should happen to spectrum currently occupied by RAI Due and Mediaset’s Rete 4. Both broadcasters had been attempting to retain the capacity after analogue [...]
337,000 digital TV subs for KPN
July 30, 2007 10.44 Europe/London By
The Dutch incumbent telco KPN ended Q2 with 337,000 TV subscriptions, or 41,000 more than three months earlier. The year-on-year increase in the total was 47%. KPN has realized this growth by mainly improving the marketing and increasing the coverage of its DTT service Digitenne. KPN’s market share of the digital TV market at the [...]
Arqiva secures SDN network upgrade
July 30, 2007 10.19 Europe/London By
Arqiva has been awarded the contract to upgrade the SDN multiplex to a high power digital network. The contract is estimated to be worth some £500 million (€685m) over its 27-year term. The SDN multiplex is owned by ITV plc and carries channels including Five, S4C and QVC alongside Top Up TV’s pay-TV service. It [...]
D Book: Now we are 5
July 27, 2007 10.59 Europe/London By
The Digital TV Group has released version 5 of The D Book, the code of practice that outlines the requirements for interoperability in the UK DTT market. The D Book 5.0 is the first major update to the publication since 2004. New topics include the signalling for the recently launched Freeview Playback digital video recorder [...]
CSA extends French DTT coverage
July 26, 2007 10.31 Europe/London By
The CSA has announced plans for 65 new zones that will be covered by digital terrestrial television. It is expected that the zones will be in place from March 2008. The French broadcast regulator hopes that by introducing the new zones broadcasters will be ultimately able to better serve the country’s metropolitan areas. A list [...]
Harmonic buys transcoding company
July 25, 2007 23.48 Europe/London By
Harmonic has acquired the transcoding software vendor Rhozet Corporation for $15.5 million (€11.3 million) in a mixture of cash and 1.1 million Harmonic shares to compliment its line of compression products for broadcast and IP-based platforms. The deal is expected to close by the end of this month. “With the addition of the Rhozet universal [...]
POT steps up DTT efforts
July 24, 2007 04.51 Europe/London By
The Polski Operator Telewizyjny (POT) consortium has begun joint MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 DTT trials in Warsaw. Backed by the national commercial broadcasters Polsat and TVN, POT initially had a one-month licence to undertake DTT trials in Warsaw and Srem near Poznan in June. However, the Office of Electronic Communications (UKE) subsequently extended it until the [...]
Ofcom plan for 4 HD channels
July 19, 2007 07.59 Europe/London By
Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards has said the regulator has drawn up a plan that would allow up to four high definition channels to be broadcast on the DTT system. Speaking to the Broadcasting Press Guild, Richards explained the plan had not been greeted with universal enthusiasm by the public broadcasters, which had been seeking [...]
