Despite the rather late launch of DTT services in France compared to some neighbouring countries, they are already being adopted widely by the viewers, thanks to a long tradition of terrestrial television reception. By increasing the number of services and the transmission quality, the digital television landscape is maintaining its rapid evolutionary pace.

This article gives a brief description of the current DTT situation in France and of its soon-to-come evolution: HDTV and mobile TV launches. In the longer term, terrestrial broadcasting networks will develop further, as a result of a national scheme to re-allocate the frequencies freed up by the digital switchover process.

This article describes an integrated system for the automatic annotation of television news programmes named ANTS (Automatic Newscast Transcription System). It consists of several analysis components, integrated within a unified architecture. Users have the possibility of accessing a large daily-growing database of news stories from the main national channels – all identified, categorised and published in a fully automatic way. The system identifies story boundaries, extracts texts from spoken content, classifies stories by subject and links external relevant information coming from the web.

The system’s performance has been evaluated in a real-life scenario by a panel of professional users inside RAI. The strength of the approach behind ANTS is its ability to integrate several heterogeneous tools in a performant and ready-for-production environment. ANTS is capable of elaborating many hours of material per day, without significant service drops and with sufficiently good accuracy for industrial deployment in large broadcasting facilities.

This article briefly describes some of the microphones developed specifically for Surround Sound pickup, along with several of the main Surround acquisition systems on which the majority of the dedicated Surround mics are based. It offers some personal advice on whether a particular system is suitable for use in this recording environment or that. Some microphone systems are obviously more intrusive “in shot” than others, depending on the location.

The author also describes two major outside broadcasts that have involved Surround Sound mixes – the Wimbledon Tennis Championships and the BBC Proms Concerts from the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Audio-over-IP end units are increasingly being used in radio operations for the streaming of radio programmes over IP networks, from remote sites or local offices into main studio centres. The IP networks used can be well-managed private networks with controlled Quality of Service. However, the open Internet is increasingly being used also for various types of radio contribution, especially over longer distances. Radio correspondents will have the choice in their equipment to use either ISDN, the Internet via ADSL or other available IP networks to deliver their reports. ISDN services used in broadcasting will be closed down in some countries.

The EBU has created a standard for interoperability in a project group, N/ACIP (Audio Contribution over IP). This standard, which has been jointly developed by members of the EBU group and manufacturers, is published as EBU Tech 3326-2007. The standard has quickly been implemented by the manufacturers. A “plug test” between nine manufacturers, held in February 2008, proved that earlier incompatible units can now connect according to the new standard.

The first T-DAB planning meeting – held in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1995 – produced an allotment Plan for T-DAB and a new agreement called “Wiesbaden Special Arrangement, 1995” (Wi95). Most of the countries in Europe obtained two coverages across their whole national territories.

Subsequently, the need for additional T-DAB services intended to cover smaller areas was identified, which led to the second T-DAB planning meeting in Maastricht (The Netherlands) in 2002. In additional to the two coverages already available in the Wi95 Plan, each CEPT country obtained one additional coverage. The original Wi95 had to be revised and it was now called “Wiesbaden 1995 Special Arrangement, as revised in Maastricht 2002” (Wi95revMa02).

Following the GE06 Agreement that resulted from RRC-04 and RRC-06, the T-DAB Special Arrangement was further revised at a meeting in Constanta, Romania, in July 2007. The revised document is now called “Wiesbaden 1995 Special Arrangement, as revised in Constanta 2007” (Wi95revCo07).