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You’re traveling in a foreign country where you know the language and you own a portable device that you use to access broadcast signals when at home.
If a disaster strikes, you can’t access an emergency broadcast system because your portable device is incompatible with the local system.
Someday, you may be able to access local TV in foreign countries — not only in emergency situations but for entertainment.
Technical executives from 13 television broadcast organizations from four continents put the finishing touches on a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday, officially forming the Future of Broadcast Television Initiative. Its primary goal will be to develop compatible broadcast standards worldwide for terrestrial television broadcasting.
The deal was signed at the second day of the National Association of Broadcasters show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. About 100,000 broadcasting executives, technicians, regulators, content managers and on-air personalities are attending the four-day event. It’s open only to the broadcast industry.
The initiative to develop compatible standards was born more than a year ago in Las Vegas at a dinner meeting of broadcast executives. The initiative advanced in November when more than 200 technical leaders met in Shanghai to discuss how to navigate through a collection of technologies and a maze of business, regulatory and technical environments.
At Tuesday’s NAB session on the Future of Broadcast Television, a panel of five broadcast leaders from four countries gave a progress report. Because the industry is in different stages of development in different countries, some are further along than others.
In the United States, technological advances have been great and broadcast standards have been in place. The biggest upheaval came in 2009 when television stations nationwide flipped the switch from analog to digital broadcasts — a change widely acknowledged as good for most consumers, but a hardship on those who didn’t understand the change was coming.
Ben Keen, chief analyst for Screen Digest, a research company, said the battle for bandwidth is likely to affect progress because spectrum is a scarce and valuable commodity and political decisions are being made on standards. Worldwide, about 1 billion television viewers live in places where decisions on analog and digital signals and other spectrum debates have yet to be made.
Mark Richer, president of the Washington-based Advanced Television Systems Committee, said a common standard worldwide eventually would drive down consumer costs as companies worldwide introduce products to access whatever broadcast standard is chosen.
Richer, whose organization has studied bringing the technologies of broadcasting and the Internet together, said it would be important to have standards that are scalable — they would need to work well with the largest of big screens as well as the smallest portable device. He also said the standard should also include accessibility to the sensory impaired.
Lieven Vermaele, director of technology and development for the European Broadcasting Union, said the terrestrial broadcast market is very competitive in most countries, like Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Bandwidth auctions like those under way in the United States already have been completed in much of Western Europe while others are in the planning stages in other Western European countries, and no auctions are scheduled yet in Eastern Europe.
Japan is the country must illustrative of how a compatible system would be beneficial to the public. Keiichi Kubota, director general of the NHK Science and Technology Research Laboratories in Tokyo, cited the lives lost in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Kubota said many people were able to communicate by Internet, but he added that local broadcast television communication could have saved many more.
Japan is about two years from developing “hybridcasts” of broadcasting and broadband communication, 10 years from standards for ultra HDTV and 20 years from spatial imaging 3DTV broadcasts.
China has a compelling interest in the initiative simply because of the large number of viewers. Panelist Wenjun Zhang, chief scientist of the Shanghai-based National Engineering Research Center of China, said his country’s switch from the analog to the digital format is under way.
Most Chinese viewers — 189 million — have cable television while 127 million watch terrestrial broadcasts, and 70 million have satellite TV.