LAS VEGAS – CBC and Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) are among the 13 international television broadcast organizations that signed a memorandum of understanding Tuesday forming the Future of Broadcast Television (FOBTV) initiative.
Announced during the NAB convention, the agreement builds on the Future of Broadcast TV Summit held last November in Shanghai, China, where broadcasting leaders established a framework for cooperation to chart the future course of terrestrial television broadcasting.
The FOBTV signatories support terrestrial broadcasting which they say is uniquely important because it is wireless (supports receivers that can move), infinitely scalable (point-to-multipoint and one-to-many architecture), local (capable of delivering geographically local content), timely (provides real time and non-real time delivery of content), and flexible (supports free-to-air and subscription services).
The goals of the FOBTV initiative include:
– Developing future ecosystem models for terrestrial broadcasting taking into account business, regulatory and technical environments;
– Developing requirements for next generation terrestrial broadcast systems;
– Fostering collaboration of Digital TV development laboratories;
– Recommending major technologies to be used as the basis for new standards, and
– Requesting standardization of selected technologies (layers) by appropriate standards development organizations.
FOBTV is a voluntary, non-profit association that is open to any organization that signs the memorandum of understanding. It is now forming a management committee that will include representatives of the founding members, and will also have a technical committee that will be responsible for solicitation and evaluation of technical proposals and recommending major technologies to be used as the basis for new standards.
Other founding members include Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), European Broadcast Union (EBU), Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Globo TV-Brazil, IEEE Broadcast Technology Society (IEEE-BTS), National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), National Engineering Research Center of Digital TV of China (NERC-DTV), NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories (NHK), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Brazilian Society of Television Engineers (SET).
