Broadcasters call for harmonised digital TV standards

Date: 19/10/00

By Simon Coss

IT IS the plug problem all over again. Just as it still impossible to travel from one EU country to another without carryinga suitcase full of electrical adapters, the development of digital television in Europe is being held back by the fact that no one seems able to agree on a standardised system for delivering the service.

This at least is the argument being put by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a Geneva-based body which brings together all the EU's main public-service broadcasters. "One of the keys to the lightning success of the mobile telephone industry lies in the inter-operability of the systems and devices. Unfortunately, the digital television market offers no such interoperability and is marked by proprietary access systems," the organisation complained recently.

The EBU's supporters say the European Commission should look into the question of standardising access to digital TV networks as a matter of urgency. Otherwise, they argue, an industry which already has access to ten million EU households and is expected to expand by more than 300% a year in the very near future may never get off the ground.

Ideally, the EBU wants the Commission to ask the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to resolve the issue. As its name suggests, ETSI is tasked with finding and drawing up common technical specifications for the European telecoms industry.

But the Commission appears neither keen to become involved in the standardisation debate nor overly concerned that the sorts of issues the EBU is worried about will actually damage the digital TV industry. An in-depth report produced for the Commission in June 2000 by the Institut de l'Audiovisuel et des Télécommunications en Europe (IDATE) found that the compatibility question did not seem to be causing significant headaches for the digital TV industry.

"The 'absence' of standards for certain decoder functions does not necessarily put a brake on the development of the market, because operators rather than consumers under-write the risk through rental and subsidy," argued the report. "Interoperability of conditional access systems remains a technical possibility, rather than an everyday reality."

In other words, IDATE seems to believe that things are progressing very nicely for the digital TV sector and does not see any urgent need for regulators to get involved.

All the evidence would suggest that the Commission has taken this message to heart. Over the past year, both Enterprise Commissioner Erkki Liikanenand his colleague Viviane Reding, who is in charge of EU audio-visual policy, have made countless speeches extolling the virtues of digital TV.

They insist it is an area in which Europe leads the world and point out that digital TV is already far more common in the Union than in the US or Japan. The two Commissioners say the new technology will eventually converge with the Internet, finally paving the way for a user-friendly and secure online commerce environment. They also insist it will provide European television programme and film-makers with a vast new market for their products.

But on the question of common standards for digital TV, both have remained remarkably silent. For the foreseeable future, at least, Europe's living rooms will continue to be festooned with countless cables, black boxes and impossible-to-understand instruction booklets.

Article forms part of a survey 'EU and the media'.