The newly elected members of the EBU Technical Committee met for the first time in Geneva on 24 October 2006, under the chairmanship of  Dr Gerd Bock(), co-Director of the Institut fur Rundfunktechnik, Germany. The Technical Committee is the EBU's most senior technical body, which manages and monitors the technical studies carried out collectively by EBU members.

The new Technical Committee needed to hit the ground running, with many complex issues on broadcasters' plates at the moment. All EBU members are currently facing the challenge of digital switchover, the great transition of terrestrial broadcasting from analogue to digital. Members need to be sensitized to the work they need to do to make this happen within the internationally agreed timescales...everything needs to be done in just a few short years. There are also decisions that broadcasters need to take about whether to remain with conventional television, or whether to add services in high definition television, or for mobile television. The world of IT programme production also opens up new opportunities for efficiency in programme making, and calls for decisions about member's vast stocks of programmes from the past, the archives which have documented our world for over 50 years. Another product of the IT age is the need to devise security systems which cannot be hacked into from the outside.

The Technical Committee's objective is to make the EBU's collaborative work focused and efficient, and to make its results accessible to all members, particularly management and staff outside the technical community, who have to live with the consequences of its work.

fdj / ep