The Head of BBC Newsgathering considers the lessons of Kosovo and looks at future technical requirements for newsgathering, issuing a challenge for equipment manufacturers and developers.

The demand for information and entertainment on the move has grown spectacularly in recent years. The ubiquitous mobile phone meets some of these needs, but in a very limited way. Mobile multimedia services would meet our needs much more effectively. Multimedia services are bandwidth-hungry and require much more downstream capacity than upstream capacity.

A cost-effective approach to delivering such services can be offered by combining digital broadcasting technology, for the high-capacity downstream links, with relatively low-speed mobile telecoms technology for the upstream links.

The EU’s ACTS programme has made major contributions to enhancing the technology, and to providing visions of the mobile interactive broadband services that could be offered to customers during the next decade. This article offers an overview of those achievements.

In this article, the authors discuss some of the challenges and opportunities resulting from the convergence of broadcast and mobile communication services. Starting with an overview of DAB, DVB and the emerging third-generation mobile communication networks – with a special focus on UMTS – the advantages that result from a combination of UMTS with data broadcast facilities, as provided by DAB and DVB, are discussed. This allows us to provide mobile users with interactive mobile IP streaming services, thereby opening the door for a lot of interesting mobile applications.

The enabling of new services is not enough, however, if we take into account the limited spectrum allocation for mobile communication systems. Hence the article discusses the possibilities for efficient and flexible spectrum utilization.

Mechanisms for dynamic spectrum and service allocation are introduced, which can be seen as a prerequisite, not only for efficient spectrum utilization, but also as an enabling technology towards more flexible communication services than we have today.