The International MHEG Promotion Alliance (IMPALA) has announced two new members. TechniSat Digital UK and LG Electronics were confirmed ahead of BroadcastAsia 2008 in Singapore.
The announcement follows the recent adoption of MHEG-5 by the UK’s Freesat and the New Zealand DTT platform Freeview|HDTM, which has become the first DTT/MPEG-4 implementation of the middleware.
LG Electronics expressed its intention to promote MHEG-5 as an international standard and the manufacturer already has its own MHEG-5 engine. “MHEG-5 is very suitable because it has low system dependency and a light software structure that results in low upfront cost. Also MHEG is an open standard with no licence fee,” said Sven Reuter, Representative for Standards, TV- and Media Applications in Europe, LG Electronics.
The licence fee reference is significant. Given that the MHP middleware has stuttered through the imposition of licence fees. On Friday, Via Licensing announced it was removing charges for MHP usage from free-to-air broadcasters.