WRC 15 was not necessarily negative for terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, according to Mario Maniewicz, deputy director, Radiocommunication Bureau, ITU, given that there was a lot of pressure exerted by the mobile industry.
While there is of course a trend to allocate more space to mobile services, it was “a good result that we can be happy about”.
Speaking in a panel discussion entitled What are the real impacts of the WRC-2015 outcomes on TV distribution?, Maniewicz added that one of the arguments used by the mobile community is that fewer people are watching terrestrial TV. This is indeed the case in some countries and will formulate their policy towards frequency allocation.
Meanwhile, Stan Baaijens, steering board member at EBU Geneva and owner Funke Digital TV in the Netherlands, said he was very concerned by the lack of unity among European countries. It is important to have unified opinion but this can be difficult to achieving in what are testing times on the continent.
Baaijens also discussed the capacity problems currently faced by cable in the Netherlands despite digital penetration being among the highest in Europe.
Zsolt Nagy, strategy and business development director, Towercom, said that the whole process was about money rather than frequencies, while Dusan Liska, principal consultant in digital TV, Czech Republic, pointed out that there was still a need for TV in live broadcasts as it offered higher quality than mobile, despite the latter being now almost entirely favoured by young people.
Answering a question from the audience, a representative of the Slovak regulator Teleoff said there was a future for regional and local DTT services in the country as long as national one existed.
