This article describes the overall evolution of the 16:9 television receiver market in Europe, and analyses the different strategies that must be undertaken to ensure its durability. It underlines the practical difficulties that have been met so far, and suggests initiatives which should help the manufacturers and the broadcasters to gain the confidence of the television viewers.

The technical innovations which are pervading the world of broadcasting will achieve their full potential only if all the professionals concerned adopt a new approach and new working methods.

In this article the Author describes how the new 16:9 format has changed the rules for shooting, and explains the aesthetic advantages it offers.

When a broadcaster is faced with any new technology there is initially a period of uncertainty. Is it just an engineering toy, or will it radically alter the production process? Such is the dilemma over virtual studios.

The Author describes the facets of virtual studio production which the BBC has found hardest to adapt and get right, and puts forward some ideas on where improvements could be made by the developers of such systems.

The Author has seen widescale changes in the role of the studio engineer during his thirty and more years in broadcasting. In this article, he describes many of these changes and gives his personal views on the problems which are being caused by the convergence of computing and broadcasting technologies in the television studio.

Last year, two new digital tape recording formats were launched, aimed at the news, current affairs and sports sectors of television production: Sony Betacam SX and Panasonic DVCPRO. In co-operation with the manufacturers, EBU Group P/DTR carried out extensive tests on these new formats and their reports on the tests became available in April of this year. These will be made available only to EBU Members.

In this article, the Author presents a synopsis of the EBU reports on these two new tape formats.

Following on from the success of the Eurovan, BBC Resources has now built a bi-media DSNV which not only serves the simultaneous needs of the BBC's radio and television news services but also is equipped for widescreen/stereo operations.

An outline description of the new vehicle is given here.

The first DAB receivers which accorded with the DAB European Telecommunication Standard became available in 1995. These were based on either a DAB channel-decoder chipset from the JESSI project, or on general-purpose DSPs. For a consumer product, the complexity of these early DAB receivers was much too high.

This article describes the features of the next generation of DAB receivers, which are due to be launched at the Berlin IFA in late August. These new receivers will be based on a second generation of channel-decoder chipsets, as developed within the JESSI AE-14 and AE-89 projects. Not only will they be much smaller (and cheaper) than the earlier models from 1995, the new generation of receivers will also support DAB transmission mode IV and the reception of low bit-rate MPEG-2 speech.

This article reports on the EBU Village held in Montreux during June.