EBU project group, P/META, is defining and representing the information requirements for the exchange of programme content between the high-level business functions of EBU members: Production, Delivery / Broadcast and Archive. The product under development – the P/META Scheme – provides defined metadata to support the identification, description, discovery and use of essence in Business-to-Business (“B2B”) transactions. The metadata may either accompany the essence in streams or files, using a variety of standardized transports; or it may be transported independently of the essence, as metadata alone. The P/META Scheme itself is independent of the technology used and may be supported by any coding protocol / transport that assures its information integrity.

This article outlines the approach taken by the P/META project and identifies the deliverables.

TV-Anytime will allow consumers to watch programmes in the way they want and when they want. Consumers will be able to access content from a variety of sources, including traditional broadcast and new on-line interactive services – for presentation at any time of the day. New tools (including hard-disk storage, set-top boxes, and high-speed Internet access) will allow us to achieve that goal, i.e. to search, select, access, personalize, capture, and manage a wide and diverse range of attractive content.

This article describes the current work to define a metadata solution, within the metadata technical framework approved by the TV-Anytime Forum. The article is based on the preliminary TV-Anytime specification, which was approved for publication on 28 September 2000 at Marina del Rey, California.

The newly-formed MPEG-7 Ad-hoc Group on Integration is currently dedicating itself to the task of integrating metadata as approached by the SMPTE (for the professional TV Production domain) with the metadata approach chosen by the MPEG-7 community. The SMPTE approach is based on a dictionary and binary coding, and is intended specifically for machine control and fast real-time applications. The MPEG-7 approach is based on standard XML and is human readable.

For professional use during the more technical phases of production and post production, the SMPTE approach can be well suited while, in the domain of consumer set-top boxes, the most promising interface is XML-based. Both approaches have value in their own right, each with distinct advantages at specific points in the content production and delivery processes. For this reason alone, it is worth the effort of trying to harmonize the two approaches. It would be of great benefit to broadcasters if production metadata and consumer services were to connect together seamlessly – without human intervention in the form of Metadata Editors in the transmission multiplex area.

Measurements and psychoacoustic investigations have been carried out in ten studio listening environments in European broadcasting organizations. The measurements were based on EBU Doc. Tech 3276 while the psychoacoustic tests related to previous investigations carried out by the author. The material used for the psychoacoustic assessment was dummy head recordings made under specific studio listening conditions. Correlations between the relevant physical and psychoacoustic parameters are given.

DTV services have rapidly developed in the last few years, based on advances in digital signal-compression technology. However, QoS issues – which are often the most critical parameter to evaluate in a DTV system – have not developed at the same pace. In order to ensure the Quality of Service provided to the end-user, there is an urgent need to develop appropriate methods and tools.

This article presents a reference model that is a generic framework for describing any automatic video-quality assessment method. The issue of in-service video-quality monitoring in DTV networks is addressed, and an effective method of monitoring the QoS is presented. This method has been implemented and tested in a range of situations – on both simulated and real DVB broadcasting networks.

This article reports on the Eurotravel 2000 Conference – Traffic and Travel Information services for everyone – which was held in Geneva last June. The resolutions adopted during the Conference are also given.

This article reports on the EBU Village at IBC 2000 in Amsterdam during September.