This article reviews the basic concepts of media streaming over the Internet, particularly those associated with Internet Protocols (IP) and server technologies. The article concentrates on the delivery aspects of audio and video over the Internet but does not cover audio and video compression schemes nor media capturing/authoring/publishing tools in any detail. These aspects will be covered in future editions of EBU Technical Review.

EBU Project Group P/MCA (Multichannel Audio) was set up to support the introduction of the 5.1 multichannel audio system for radio and television. The group has now reported and the results of its work are presented here.

Television sound can no longer be considered as a single entity. We will soon have viewers (listeners?) demanding “5.1” cinema-quality sound from every programme, whilst others – possibly the elderly or hard-of-hearing – wanting just the programme dialogue to be clearly reproduced from a tiny portable television.

In this article, the author paints a picture of what he personally believes can be done with TV sound to cater for different user expectations – without making any fundamental changes to existing digital TV receivers, nor adding any significant costs at the production level.

This article is aimed at television broadcasters who want to go on-air with multichannel audio – using the Dolby® Digital (AC-3) audio delivery system. The necessary prerequisites to achieve this are described here, for different sections of the programme chain.

Digital Audio Broadcasting (or DAB for short) has moved into a phase of “industrialisation”, with many new broadcast services starting throughout Europe and beyond. The choice and availability of different types of DAB receivers is also expanding at an encouraging rate, as outlined in this article.

With the 2002 CEPT Maastricht Conference now behind us, this article provides an insight into some of the more important decisions made on the future spectrum availability for T-DAB services.