Italian broadcasters are being held back by obsolete transmission centres, according to the head of the association representing local TV broadcasters.
Drawing a comparison between the recently completed CES (Consumer Electronic Show) in Las Vegas, Marco Rossignoli, coordinator of Aeranti-Corallo, said the failure to complete the transition to DVB-T2/HEVC was penalising the Italian local TV sector.
Rossignoli said that while the global market presents increasingly high-performance and large-sized television screens, capable of fully exploiting the potential of high-quality image and sound encoding technologies, Italian local broadcasters are still forced to operate with obsolete transmission standards.
“This situation determines an unjustified limitation of the quality of the service offered to citizens by local TV”.
“While national television broadcasters have been assigned adequate transmission capacity, even continuing to use the old DVB-T standard (with MPEG-4 compression instead of MPEG-2), local televisions are forced to transmit with a significantly lower quality, pending the completion of the transition to DVB-T2/HEVC”.
Rossignoli said this not only damages the competitiveness of local TV but also impacts the plurality of information and the use of local content by the public.
He called on the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy (MIMIT), to define as soon as possible a binding timetable for the completion of the transition to DVB-T2/HEVC, alongside specific measures to support the technological adaptation process.
