The doors of the IBC exhibition swing open at around 12.00 on Friday afternoon. By then the conference will already be underway for a day and a half.
This past week my task has been to separate all the non-announcements from those companies that really do have something to say and I have compiled a little list of who and what might be worth seeing. Some will turn out to have good PR and of course there’s always the company that has something really clever – invariably in the New Technology Campus – but no one has actually realised.
- Eco friendly boxes. Someone has to compensate for the power consumption of all those plasmas. Pace, NDS and Humax all have solutions to turn the box off when it has lost your attention.
- CI+. Formed out of a breakaway from the DVB project, the new version of Common Interface is gaining traction in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
- DVB-T2. The new transmission system to squeeze in even more channels into DTT. Expect to see demos across the show from Pace through to the DVB and beyond.
- New middlewares. IPTV has let new companies like Dreampark emerge, but Latens has an solution too. ANT has a new version of Galio. Existing players OpenTV and NDS are enhancing their offerings. Will the boxes cope? Look to Harmonic for one possible answer.
- Super Hi-Vision. The next generation HD system demoed by NHK (Japan), BBC (UK), RAI (Italy) and the EBU.
- Personalised Advertising. This is the theme that everyone is pushing, but how close is it to being a reality, and how will satellite households handle the solution?
- Whatever happened to mobile TV? The Mobile Zone will have the answers to the technology we’re not sure if we want.
