TALLINN: LEVIRA DIGITAL BROADCASTING CONFERENCE. Michel Combes, the president and CEO of France’s TDF, has emphasised the importance of a providing strong FTA offer in order to facilitate the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting. He was speaking at the second Levira Digital Broadcasting conference in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, which is looking at digital switchover in Eastern and Western Europe, mobile TV and MPEG-4 AVC for DTT. TDF has interests in eight countries, three of which – Estonia, Poland and Hungary – are in Central and Eastern Europe. In Estonia, the transmission company Levira, in which it holds a 49% stake, now operates a three-multiplex DTT platform employing MPEG-4 compression that should cover 98% of the population by next year. The analogue switch off date in Estonia, currently one of the most advanced countries for DTT in CEE, has been set for February 1, 2012. Its near-neighbour Finland will go all-digital at the end of this month.
