The DVB needs to regain the total support of broadcasters in order to recapture the success of the 1990’s.
In a speech at DVB World 2019, EBU Director of Technology and Innovation, Antonio Arcidiacono, called for a return to the four planks that had seen European industry join with the major broadcasters of the time.
- End-to-end value control
- Zero marginal cost per additional user
- Continental coverage
- Public and private working together
Arcidiacono said their deployment within the DVB Project had “guaranteed speedy and sustained growth, resulting in a global success for the DVB family of standards”.
However, while private broadcasters reaped the benefits of their investment the bigger players, such as Sky and Canal Plus, had adopted a winner-takes-it-all mentality.
As public broadcasters were seeing their funds cut, US tech firms Netflix and Amazon with “almost unlimited funds” and “thousands of dedicated engineers” were able to “produce compelling content representing today a real and tangible threat to the broadcasting industry”.
Arcidiacono said that within the DVB, standards had been defined jointly by public and private broadcasters, network operators and manufacturers and immediately supported at political and regulatory level while commercially deployed.
There were mistakes, but as DVB chairman Peter MacAvock pointed out later, MHP was probably ten years ahead of its time and laid the foundation for the HbbTV interactive protocol. “It’s a technology which needed to happen for other technologies to take off,” he said.
According to MacAvock, the DVB was now seeing a new transformation as a move from traditional linear transmissions to true broadband TV took place: “The transition is going to take place, it’s going to take a generation or more to succeed, but if the DVB is going to be true to its tradition it’s something that we should embrace now.”
The definition of the service remained common across the featuresets and it was the DVB’s job to improve the consumer experience.
