The BBC has always worked in a so-called horizontal market where many players can share the same technology for different business purposes. The only way we can make this work is by adopting standards. Standards define almost every part of the broadcast chain, from the capture of images and sound, all the way through to the display and loudspeakers at home. We therefore make a serious effort to help standards bodies to create proposals which will work well for public service broad - casters and in a complementary way to the commercial goals of private industry.
Technical standards documentation is essential in a global media opperation.
The BBC is required by conditions attached to its Charter to actively support appropriate development of ‘open standards’, that is to say, technologies where opportunities to participate in their creation and to use them are made widely available, either free of charge or on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory.
Some standards endure for many years; otherwise we would find it difficult to operate. However, the situation is always fluid because of new consumer devices and services, technical developments and changes in business processes. New standards and additions to existing ones frequently need to be progressed, and the pace of change is accelerating. For the past twenty years or so, we have seen a steady movement away from national standards towards international and global bodies. But there is still no single body with overall responsibility for the standards used in broadcasting, and indeed we now find standards from the telecommunications and IT industries that are equally relevant to our business. This means we often have to follow work through several standards bodies to ensure we have the right tools for us at the end. Because of our pro-active approach to standards, engineers from BBC R&D are frequently invited to join standardisation groups, recognising not just their technical contribution, but the fair and reasonable balance we are able to broker when discussions become fractious and commercial. In many groups we are also asked to take the chair. There are a number of standardisation groups, for example MPEG and some of the technical groups in the EBU and SMPTE, where we hold membership or otherwise just follow the proceedings, to make sure the BBC’s interests are not being compromised.
NATIONAL STANDARDS
Click Digital TV Group (DTG)The Digital TV Group is an industry association for digital television in the UK. This group defined the profile of the DVB standards which is now used for all Freeview services, and they have a laboratory which is able to test compliance of consumer equipment with those standards. BBC R&D engineers have worked closely with the Digital TV Group to set these standards. Now the group is concentrating on high definition television, radio spectrum issues, and domestic systems
EUROPEAN STANDARDS
Click European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) ETSI is the dominant European body with responsibility for broadcasting and telecommunication standards. Most of the broadcast standards we use are standardised in ETSI, including DAB, the DVB suite of standards, and TV-Anytime.
Click European Broadcasting Union (EBU) The EBU is no longer the prime body for creating broadcast standards as it was in the days of MAC and NICAM. It has now changed its role to act as a consensus building body, ensuring that public service broadcasters in Europe are able to develop a common viewpoint. It also hosts other standards groups, for example the DVB. Much of the EBU’s formal documentation is published and subsequently referenced in the standards. The EBU organises its work into a series of technical groups, and we contribute to a number of these.
Click TV-Anytime European Users Group The Group has started working on creating a more ‘Semantic Web’-friendly representation of the TV-Anytime data model using RDF (Resource Description Framework).
INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS
Click Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) The Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is a consortium of over 270 companies and other organisations developing global standards for the delivery of digital television and data services. Their work has now extended beyond broadcasting to cover the convergence of internet and mobile systems in the home. DVB specifications are offered to ETSI, CENELEC, the EBU, or the ITU to create the standards themselves. BBC R&D are instrumental in a number of DVB standards.
DVB-CPT This group maintains the DVB ‘Blue Book’, the technical specification for the DVB copy protection and copy management (DVB-CPCM). An updated and more complete CPCM specification was released early this year.
DVB-GBS We chair the SEG sub-group, which has defined the carriage of TV-Anytime data in the SI within the DVB transport stream.
DVB-T2 BBC R&D are leading the study group which has prepared the DVB-T2 specification. We are one of the key technical contributors and the editors of the document.
European High Definition Forum (EHDF) audio sub-group Comprised of audio professionals from around 10 European organisations, mostly broadcasters, with a few manufacturers, this group has been a useful means to share experience and knowledge in the rapidly evolving world of surround sound broadcasting. Although supported to a significant extent by the EBU it is not restricted to members of the EBU.
Click The Digital Media ProjectThe Digital Media Project (DMP) is a non-profit Association. Its mission is to promote the successful development, deployment and use of digital media that respect the rights of creators and rights holders to exploit their works, the wish of end users to fully enjoy the benefits of digital media and the interests of value-chain players to provide products and services. The DMP has recently released a series of specifications on interoperable digital rights management.
Click SMPTE and the Click Advanced Media Workflow Association (formerly the AAF) The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers are based in the USA and have produced many relevant standards. We are maintaining an active role in several standardisation bodies, particularly the SMPTE and the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), as they continue their work on standards relevant to television production. The SMPTE MXF standard, becoming widely used for capture and storage of content in tapeless production systems, has been revised to correct ambiguities in the specification and to add new support for carrying application-specific data that is required in some circumstances. We have also led and completed the standardisation of SMPTE 410M, an addition to MXF which enables data streams such as subtitles and other non video or audio data to be carried. We have participated on the board of the AMWA as its scope has been widened to include a greater user and workflow focus. This has led to increased membership and new collaborative projects. During the year, we led the AMWA engineering group in its release of an updated open source software toolkit, known as AAF v1.1.2, which provides support for AAF, MXF and XML formats in a single toolkit. This toolkit is in use in the industry to read and write standard format files. The Media Dispatch Protocol has completed its standardisation process and is now SMPTE 2032-2007. It provides a standard mechanism for managing content delivery between production centres; this will become an important requirement for our work on tapeless production. We are participating in a joint SMPTE-EBU taskforce on next-generation timing and synchronisation signals for use in production, suitable for use in IT-based production systems and at high frame rates as we consider HDTV and beyond. Our video coding technique Dirac is also being standardised through the SMPTE.
Click Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The IEEE is a key organisation for network related standards development. The main areas of interest to us are the wired and wireless networking standards, comprising the IEEE802 group of standards including Ethernet (IEEE802.3), WiFi (IEEE802.11) and WiMAX (IEEE802.16). We attend IEEE 802.11 and, to a lesser extent, IEEE802.16 standardisation meetings, with a particular interest in promoting the use of wireless networks for video applications. We have helped to form a new Task Group, IEEE802.11aa, which will draft amendments to the existing WiFi standards to better support video transport. Furthermore, the Study Group looking at the next generation of wireless technologies, which is likely to lead to the formation of a Task Group during 2008, has identified video transport as a key requirement in more than half of the use-cases considered.
International Electro - technical committee The IEC prepares standards for electrical, electronic and related technologies. In some respects it overlaps work in ETSI, IEEE and CENELEC, among others. Usefully, it seeks to lay down performance bounds, for example, the sensitivity one can expect from certain types of radio receiver, to ensure that systems work effectively.
CENELEC, the European Committee for Electro technical Standardisation prepares voluntary standards for electrical and electronic goods and services. The most immediate relevance to our work is their influence on the specifications of receiver performance.
Click DAB WorldDMB Forum and Click DRM Consortium We have continued to contribute to the international development of digital radio standards by taking part in the WorldDMB Forum and the DRM Consortium. We chair the Technical Committees of both organisations, and recently a member of the BBC World Service was elected chair of the DRM Consortium itself. We have tried to ensure the stability of the existing standards in order to protect BBC services and infrastructure. At the same time we have contributed to the creation of new solutions that help to widen the appeal of digital radio worldwide and enhance its appeal to the listening public.
Click Audio Engineering Society Most of the digital interfaces used in the audio industry are based on standards managed by the AES, and we have contributed in the past to a number of these. We are now helping to draft standards for carrying metadata in digital audio streams and for audio file interchange. We are also involved in the standardisation of audio/video synchronisation measurements.
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