Timeline for next generation DVB digital services

[BGonaSTICK]

For more than a decade DVB standards have been utilized to deliver a raft of digital services around the world. To date, over 150 million receivers have been deployed across six continents to receive digital terrestrial, satellite and cable transmissions. Of these, about 90 million are satellite receivers and more than 40 million are receiving DVB-T signals, whilst DVB-C is the most commonly used system for digital cable TV. DVB-T has seen phenomenal growth in the last few years and is likely to build on the successes in Europe and Australia with further adoptions across South East Asia, Africa and possibly Latin America. The economies of scale engendered by such success mean that the prices consumers have to pay for equipment are falling all the time.

The existing DVB family of standards has served the industry well and is intended to live on for several more years. However, as technology moves forward the opportunity arises to improve on these standards to create successor systems that will offer greater efficiencies and levels of performance.

“One can no longer expect a core DVB technology never to change. DVB’s role in an ever evolving technological world is to not only develop the necessary new technologies, but also to improve upon its existing standards to meet the demanding commercial requirements of the digital environment,” commented Peter MacAvock, DVB’s Executive Director.

One such standard that has already benefited from this approach is the DVB-S satellite specification. At NAB 2005, DVB announced the ratification of DVB-S2, the most advanced satellite distribution technology that built on the success of DVB-S. DVB-S2 benefited from the latest developments in channel coding and modulation to deliver performance that approaches the theoretical limit for such systems. A new release of the specification, including an additional optional interface for interactive services and additional features for mobility, is expected around the end of 2007.

DVB has recently started work on DVB-T2, an advanced digital broadcast transmission system that seeks to exploit opportunities brought about by analogue switch-off. It will facilitate the wider deployment of second generation terrestrial HDTV services. DVB-T2 could also see even better mobile reception at a given data rate.

With DVB-T2 commercial requirements now defined, it is expected that work on the specification will be completed and passed to ETSI for standardization towards the end of 2007. Market deployment can be anticipated for 2009.

Another new specification is DVB-SH, a member of the DVB-H family, which is designed to deliver IP based media content and data to handheld terminals like mobile phones and PDAs via satellite. It includes features such as turbo coding for forward error correction and a highly flexible interleaver in an advanced system designed to cope with the hybrid satellite/terrestrial network topology.

A study mission on a possible DVB-H2 system is due to commence later this year which could produce a finalized specification in 2008. It is not unthinkable that DVB-H2 and DVB-T2 specifications will be interrelated systems.

A DVB-C2 specification could take advantage of the latest advancements in the handling of data rates per channel, algorithms for forward error correction, interleaving and modulation.