This article examines the principles underlying the technical activities of the EBU as it moves forward into the 21st century. In particular, it stresses the need to continue providing high-quality technical information for the benefit of EBU members, including advice on equipment purchasing. The work of the EBU Project Groups should be made available not only to the technical areas of EBU members but also to inter-disciplinary groups, where appropriate.

Further, the EBU must pay great attention to the development of specifications and/or standards that enable interoperability of products from different manufacturers. EBU members, at the national level, have the responsibility of ensuring that spectrum regulators and/or administrations are well aware of the needs of broadcasters. The article concludes with an overview of the benefits of holding virtual conferences, in a drive to keep down the travel costs of members.

The advent of Internet multimedia has stimulated the development of several advanced audio and video compression technologies. Although most of these developments have taken place outside the EBU, many members are using these low bit-rate codecs extensively for their webcasting activities, either for downloading or live streaming. To this end, the EBU Project Group, B/AIM (Audio in Multimedia), was asked to carry out some tests on several low bit-rate audio codecs that are now available on the commercial Internet market.

This article gives the results of the subjective evaluations undertaken by B/AIM in late 1999 and early 2000. These EBU tests are the first international attempt at comparing the different audio compression schemes used on the Internet. In addition, prior to conducting these tests, no internationally-agreed subjective method was available for carrying out evaluations on very low bit-rate, intermediate-quality, codecs. In order to overcome this problem, the group was instrumental in devising a novel test method to evaluate specifically these low-quality audio codecs. The new method is now known as MUSHRA. Both the EBU and ITU-R have now adopted MUSHRA as a standard evaluation method.