EBU Technical Review : No. 251 (Spring 1992)
Presenting the new Technical Review . . .
Readers who have a set of EBU Review - Technical on their library shelves, starting with the issue dated January 1958, may be surprised to learn that their collection is incomplete.
For, in fact, the history of the EBU Technical Review is almost as long as that of broadcasting itself. It finds its roots in the fourth meeting of the Administrative Council of the International Broadcasting Union held on 8 July 1925. On that occasion the IBU decided to publish a "Bulletin" that was "to be as comprehensive as it could possibly be made, containing authoritive information on progress in wireless technology". Just to situate those early issues in a technical time-scale, we can read in the Bulletin of January 1930, for example, that the BBC was broadcasting "Twice each week after the closedown of normal programmes on Tuesdays and Fridays, a half-hour of experimental television (Baird)." The technology of the day was a Nipkow disk giving a picture of 30 vertical lines, broadcast from the BBC's MF radio transmitter at Brookmans Park in North London.
290 monthly issues were published in the next 25 years – until the break-up of the IBU in 1950. Then, the newly-established European Broadcasting Union continued publication of the "Bulletin", the only substantial modification being a fresh start at "Volume 1, Number 1", dated 15 May 1950. We can read in this first issue a report on colour television demonstrations organized in the United States for CCIR Study Group 11: "The interesting feature of the RCA demonstration was the use, in the receiver, for one of the first times, of a single cathode-ray tube for the three colours"; there followed a description of the shadow-mask tube which, over four decades later, remains the basic colour television display technology.
The next major change came in 1958, when the EBU Bulletin was split into two publications, one technical and the other concerned with programmes, administration and law, under the common title "EBU Review". In the first issue of the EBU Review – Technical dated January 1958 (issue Number 47 since it followed 46 issues of the post-1950 Bulletin) we can find an Editorial signed by Sir Ian Jacob, President of the EBU. Commenting on the aims of the new Review, he wrote "We want to obviate the danger of having articles which mean nothing except to their authors and a few specialists who might have written them themselves". That was sound policy and we can observe with some satisfaction that only a handful of articles have transgressed this rule to any serious extent. A noteworthy event reported in that first issue of the EBU Review – Technical concerned the New Year's Eve Eurovision programme "Pictures in the Sky" (31 December 1957), which, with ten participating broadcasters, was the first multi-source/multi-destination Eurovision exchange.
The only other format revisions of any great consequence are to be seen in the EBU Technical Review in your hands now. The December 1991 issue, Number 250, was the last in a format which had remained virtually unchanged since 1958. Many of the section headings were inherited from the Bulletin of 1950 and some features even from the IBU Bulletin of the 1920s! That the Review should have changed so little over the years might lead us to conclude that the editorial staff have been lacking inspiration. That conclusion would be unjust. Rather we should observe that the style, presentation and, above all, the choice of content of the 1958 Review were so closely aligned with readers' expectations that change was not strictly necessary. And as modern maintenance philosophy puts it: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!".
So, why change the EBU Technical Review now? The changes you see in this issue are above all a response to changes in the world about us. The new presentation of the Review is intended to strike a balance between a desire to raise the profile of the EBU in the ever more confusing (and confused) world of broadcast engineering, and respect for the principles of 1925 and 1958 – as valid today as they were then – demanding that we publish authoritive information in a manner which renders it accessible to the greatest number of our professional colleagues.
In preparing this new presentation, our editorial team has seized opportunities brought by changes in publishing technologies used in the EBU Publications Division. The traditional galley proofs, the endless proof-reading, the drawing-board and Indian ink, the cut-and-paste are things of the past as EBU Technical Publications now uses one of the world's most advanced computer publishing systems to process articles from raw manuscript through to final page layout. It is to the credit of our publishing staff that no readers appear to have noticed one important change to the Review which they deliberately kept as inconspicuous as possible: that was in the April 1991 issue when our Review changed over from commercial typesetting and hand-drafted illustrations to fully-integrated in-house electronic publishing. Editing, translating, typesetting, illustrations and colour all under the control of a single publishing software – Interleaf 5 – on a single keyboard.
Finally, the presentation is a response to ideas gathered over the past 12 months in a process of consultation embracing members of the EBU Technical Committee and readers. And it is you, our readers, who are best placed to gauge the result . . .
I have mentioned a highlight of contempory broadcast technology at each step of our Review's long history. Leafing now through this issue, Number 251, we find a series of articles – certainly authoritative, hopefully accessible – on 140 Mbit/s digital HDTV satellite broadcasting technologies. Baird, the shadowmask, the early days of Eurovision and now digital HDTV – who knows what the EBU Technical Review will contain next time we change the presentation?
George T. Waters
Director
EBU Technical Department
European Broadcasting Union
