Peter MacAvock is stepping down from his role as executive director of the DVB Project Office. He spoke to Julian Clover
For 14 years Peter MacAvock has witnessed first hand the development of digital television in Europe. His first job at the organisation’s Geneva-headquarters was to proof read the specification for digital satellite television, which was to become DVB-S, before going on to do the same across terrestrial and cable platforms.
“I remember at the time we needed to get letterheads for printing our invoices,” MacAvock told me recently. “I sat down with a graphic artist and told him I wanted something like the CD logo, not thinking that we might want to use it on a product, he didn’t have much time but he did it up and you see it pretty much everywhere now.”
Asked for the greatest achievement during his time at the DVB, MacAvock recalls the work of Mario Cominetti, the former head of RAI research labs who in 1993 was told that he was spending too much time on the development of a modulation system for what was to become DVB-S. The creation of the DVB was designed to go some way towards completing his goal, but rather than decelerate the pace of his work he was told he should accelerate it. The head of the DVB Technical Module Ulrich Reimers told him he had eight months to complete his work. “He did it in two, finished the specification by the end of 1993, it was published in 1994 and there’s now a hundred-odd million boxes out there with the DVB-S specification. It came out at exactly the right time, at cost, and with the industry support behind it.” MacAvock says the achievement was in gathering the digital pay-TV operators together and persuading them to keep to the DVB system rather than look for a proprietary solution.
The downside has been the work on systems that were never used, such as the DVB-T return channel; though MacAvock points out that it did go on to form the basis of Wimax. Unsurprisingly the years of work put into the MHP API and the circumstances that arose from the patent process are not fondly remembered. MacAvock says the approach from some members was naïve as commercial pressures overtook them. “Part of my job has always been to reflect the efforts that go into the specification, above and beyond the call of duty, by guys that are little known even within their own organisation. We couldn’t do it with MHP because there was a huge amount of effort that went into it and it wasn’t rewarded in the way it should have been.” MacAvock cites the difficulty in getting interactive television to work in the free-to-air environment as one reason for MHP’s lack of success. “It will be successful as MHP, as it already is via GEM in the Blu-ray environment and, as OCAP, in the US, but it has been torture getting there.”
MacAvock isn’t going too far, to the technical department of the EBU as programme manager, putting him on the same floor as the DVB Project Office and enabling his successor to perhaps benefit from some Irish wisdom.
