The Internet and mobile phone networks are throwing down great challenges to traditional broadcasters. This article offers a gleam of hope to beleaguered broadcasters who are impatient for DAB and DVB-T to really excite the marketplace, in the same way that the WWW, DVDs and WAP-enabled telephones have.

Video recorders based on hard disks, rather than on tape, are now being introduced as consumer products. This article suggests that these devices will eventually revolutionize broadcasting, by allowing consumers to break free of the constraints of linear broadcasting. Although such technologies will offer many opportunities for broadcasters, there will also be some threats to established business models, such as the use of commercial breaks during TV programmes.

Terrestrial digital television (DVB-T) is now being launched in a growing number of European countries. However, this is only a start in what will be – for some years to come – a mixed analogue and digital environment, where the basis for planning is from an “analogue world”.

This article provides some ideas on how migration from analogue to terrestrial digital TV may be achieved. It is hoped that new ideas will be stimulated and developed as a result.

This article describes the RAI SlotFill system which allows the exploitation of unused SNG capacity for “batch” connections between the RAI Central Archive and remote production centres. The SlotFill system guarantees automatic management of the satellite transmissions, avoiding any interference to the “high priority” SNG services.

This article describes the interoperability tests, via satellite, which the EBU recently carried out on commercially-available MPEG-2 Professional 4:2:2 Profile@Main Level encoders and decoders.

The EBU-developed Broadcast Wave Format has now been around for about five years. Here, the author takes a light-hearted look at this audio file format, which is now an AES standard.