European Broadcasting Union - Technical Activities

Technical Activities

The objective of the EBU's technical activities is simply to assist EBU Members (see below) in this period of unprecedented technological changes. This includes provision of technical information to Members via conferences and workshops, as well as in written form (such as the EBU Technical Review, and the EBU tech-i magazine).

The EBU also encourages active collaboration between its Members on the basis that they can freely share their knowledge and experience, thus achieving considerably more than individual Members could achieve by themselves. Much of this collaboration is achieved through Project Groups which study specific technical issues of common interest: for example, EBU Members have long been preparing for the revision of the 1961 Stockholm Plan.

The EBU places great emphasis on the use of open standards. Widespread use of open standards (such as MPEG-2, DAB, DVB, etc.) ensures interoperability between products from different vendors, as well as facilitating the exchange of programme material between EBU Members and promoting "horizontal markets" for the benefit of all consumers.

EBU Members and the EBU Technical Department have long played an important role in the development of many systems used in radio and television broadcasting, such as:

• The AES/EBU digital audio interface, formally known as AES3;
• Serial and parallel interfaces for digital video (ITU-R Recommendations 601 and 656);
• RDS – the Radio Data System used on FM broadcasting.
• The EBU Loudness Recommendation R 128 and 'EBU Mode' meters (EBU Tech 3341)

The EBU has also actively encouraged the development and implementation of:

• Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) through Eureka Project 147 and the WorldDAB Forum;
• Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) through the DVB Project and DigiTAG;
• Digital radio in the bands currently used for AM broadcasting through DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale);
• Standardisation of PVR systems through the TV-Anytime Forum.
• Development of other content distribution networks on the internet through P2PTV; EBU Project Group D/P2P, from November 2007 to April 2008, with a trial of selected member channels, thanks to Octoshape's distribution platform. The EBU is also part of the European P2P-Next project.