DVB-T2 wins IBC Innovation Award

DVB-T2 wins IBC Innovation Award

By Robert Briel
Published: September 13, 2010 06.35 Europe/London

IBC 2010 – AMSTERDAM. The DVB-T2 transmission system has been honoured with the IBC Innovation Award for Content Delivery technology. At the IBC ceremony, the award was presented to the BBC for its successful implementation of the DVB-T2 advanced transmission technology.
BBC’s Research & Development. along with 60 other DVB member companies, collaborated to develop DVB-T2, the second-generation terrestrial broadcasting format.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Reimers, chairman of the DVB Technical Module, commenting on the award said, “”On behalf of the 240 member companies of the DVB Project I happily welcome the Innovation Award presented today to the BBC Research and Development Department and to DVB.

“Many countries around the world have adopted DVB-T for terrestrial broadcasting of digital content and hundreds of millions of DVB-T receivers have been sold. In the 16 years since the development of DVB-T, Moore´s law and the growing understanding of even more complex algorithms for signal processing, Forward Error Correction (FEC) and modulation have enabled the development of DVB-T2.

It was the BBC that initiated the design of DVB-T2 – a system that includes the latest technology and displays such an excellent performance. Dr. Nicholas D. Wells was the chair of both the team that did the technology study preceding the work on the standard and the chair of the group that mastered the real system development. While a significant number of companies from various countries around the world contributed to the work, it is fair to say that the members of BBC R&D were the driving force behind the development of DVB-T2”.

DVB-T2 offers higher efficiency, robustness and flexibility with a 50% increase in efficiency over any other DTT system in the world.

Between June 2007 and March 2008, the DVB-T2 Technical Module met to deliver the specification. It was through their commitment and collaboration that the new standard was developed, proved and published in a remarkably short span of time. The DVB Technical Module endorsed the draft specification in March 2008 and, in June 2008, the DVB Steering Board approved the DVB-T2 specification. Formal ratification of the standard from ETSI came in September 2009 (EN 302 755).

At the IBC the DVB Project Group demonstates DVB-T2 with live transmissions of HD 3DTV on the DVB Stand 1.D81.