In 2007 the Spanish broadcaster Sociedad Española de Radiodifusión (SER) carried out DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) experimental tests in close collaboration with other companies experienced in broadcasting: Vimesa Axión and the University of the Basque Country.

This article sums up the results obtained from these experimental tests. Firstly, an introductory section describes the transmission and reception infrastructures. Subsequently, the test results are summarized in three sections: Simulcast, Monocast DRM and Monocast DRM Indoor Reception.

While DAB take-up has been very successful in a few markets, it has failed in other markets due partly to a lack of compelling digital-only content.

In this article, PURE Digital – the most successful DAB receiver manufacturer over the past five or six years – provides an upbeat analysis of what the future holds for DAB-based digital radio. The article concludes with a section from parent-company, Imagination Technologies, on the latest silicon developments for digital radio.

This article briefly describes the current status of R&D on the “Super Hi-Vision” television system in Japan. The R&D efforts on Super Hi-Vision are intended to explore the next-generation television system to succeed HDTV at some point in the future, and it consists of ultra-HD images and three-dimensional multichannel sound. The conceptual ideas behind the research project and the status of the technological developments are described. The collaboration between various EBU Members and NHK is also mentioned.

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a recent amendment to the ISO/ITU Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC) standard, which provides optional but efficient scalability functionalities on top of the high coding efficiency of H.264/AVC. In addition to bringing a cost-efficient solution to the delivery of different formats of the same content to multiple users, it can be used to provide a better viewing experience (enhanced content portability, device power / content-quality adaptation, fast zapping times and fluid forward / rewind functions, efficient error retransmission, etc.).

This article describes the potential of SVC, in terms of applications and performance. A brief overview of SVC functionalities, as well as practical use cases, are given in the following sections. Different performance evaluations, based on test results, are also described.

In this article we report on a study that explores the contribution of social tags, professional metadata and automatically generated metadata to the retrieval process. In the tagging phase of the study, 194 participants tagged a total of 115 educational videos. In the search phase, 140 participants searched the video collection for answers to eight questions.

The results show that, in the current context, social tags yield an effective retrieval process, whereas automatically-generated metadata do not. In this study we have found some evidence for the claim that social tagging is effective, because in the retrieval process the same terminology is used as in the process of assigning metadata.