Over the next few years, the Stockholm Frequency Plan of 1961 will be revised to produce a new plan for digital broadcasting in the European Broadcasting Area. In this article, the author describes some of the lessons learned from history which must be taken into account when revising the original Stockholm Plan.

Through the auspices of the ITU, many countries of Europe have embarked on a process to revise the arrangements for the planning of terrestrial television for a digital era. Whilst engineers clearly have a vital role to play in providing technical solutions to facilitate the preparation of the new plan, there are other factors that must be resolved before the engineers can proffer a solution.

This article seeks to highlight why we are having a Conference and the key issues to be addressed in seeking a successful outcome. It will require the cooperation and expertise from all the parties involved – including administrations and broadcasters who will need to be clear about their requirements in order that technically satisfactory solutions can be achieved.

This article gives a brief outline of the topics to be discussed at the forthcoming T-DAB planning meeting, which will be held in Maastricht during June 2002.

Radio archivists and engineers across Europe have agreed on a simple set of terms for describing archive content. This set agrees with the standard widely used in conventional archives, libraries, publishing and web production – and by the Audio Engineering Society.

This article describes what was agreed and why, and how it fits in with other metadata work in broadcasting.

Since we last reported here on the work of EBU Project Group P/Meta, the Metadata Exchange Scheme has been published in version 0.9 (to encourage user feedback).

This follow-up article describes what is expected to appear in version 1.0 of the Scheme, to be published in Spring 2002 – what it will represent and how it will relate to other metadata schemes, particularly those of the SMPTE and TV-Anytime. The article identifies what should happen next to support implementation and use of the Scheme, and describes some example transactions used in the P/Meta demonstration at IBC 2001.

The heir apparent of teletext – TeleWeb – is designed to link television to the internet and offer users an enhanced teletext service.

This article describes how viewers can make use of the new service via any suitable television set, without additional connections or financial charges. The first TeleWeb receivers arrived on the market at the 2001 Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin (IFA 2001). The present receivers operate without a two-way channel but future TeleWeb sets will be interactive.