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DVB-RCT: The Missing Link For Digital Terrestrial TV

 
Company: Harris
Author: Gerard Faria
Category(s): TV transmission
Published: Sat, 6 Jul 2002
Acrobat PDF (913kb)
 
The Television Broadcasters are facing an exciting challenge: to invent the television of tomorrow.
While DVB-T (The European Terrestrial Digital TV system) continues its progression among the broadcaster community around the world, the interest for new services to sustain its successful commercial deployment grows tremendously.


The market introduction by the Digital Video Broadcasting forum (DVB) of the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) provides the broadcasters with The Terminal able to implement many categories of Interactive new Services. MHP aims at serving Interactivity… Well, for a real interactivity from the customers to the providers, a return channel is needed. That is the objective of the DVB-RCT system: to offer to the terrestrial broadcasters a wireless return channel, to be deployed with the Digital Terrestrial TV platform (DVB-T).


DVB endorsed the DVB-RCT specification in April 2001, the ETSI (European Telecom Standard Institute) ratified & published it in March 2002 (as the EN 301 958 v1.1.1 (2002-03) and the International Telecom Union (ITU-R) recommended the DVB-RCT system as "the preferred wireless return path" for the DVB-T Digital Terrestrial TV.


Apart this recognition from prestigious standardisation bodies, technical works have been performed to make the DVB-RCT system a reality:


The WITNESS project, founded by the European Community (IST program) and launched in October 2000, deployed two DVB-RCT platforms in Ireland (Dublin) & France (Rennes) and performed field trials to verify the suitability of the system in Rural & Urban environments.

On the terminal side, the IM4DTTV project, founded by the European States (MEDEA+ program) and launched in May 2001, engaged the work to design silicon components to build the first ever DVB-RCT setop boxes. Also, IM4DTTV engaged the design of the network equipment allowing the deployment of DVB-T & DVB-RCT network infrastructures.

Following a short presentation of the DVB-RCT basics, this contribution reports on the major results obtained in the field, by the Witness partners and shortly presents the progress of the IM4DTTV project, in regard to the DVB-RCT platform component design.


Moreover, this contribution aims to inform the broadcasters community on the near reality of DVB-RCT systems, while making aware the Regulation bodies that the emerging DVB-RCT system will soon require spectrum licences in the UHF/VHF bands…


As the world conference of Administrations on spectrum regulation (WARC 2005) is in preparation, is not it a good time now to consider Wireless Interactive Television, then the DVB-RCT's spectrum needs?