| Vol. 16, No. 5 - October/November/December 2004 | ||
European Cable Operators |
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By Barry Flynn It may have passed the rest of the world by, but 2004 marked the year when cable operators in Europe began transmitting a commercial high-definition television (HDTV) service to their subscribers (see box below).
The first services launched, with very little fanfare, on January 1st, 2004, when Belgian High Definition (HD) production house Alfacam began broadcasting its Euro1080 channel—now known as HD-1—on the Astra satellite platform, showing a mix of sports, music, and cultural events. There is also an "events" channel, dubbed HD-e, designed to show concerts and other live events in digital cinemas, as broadcasters slowly begin showcasing big cultural events in hi-res formats. German commercial broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1's production arm recently simulcast a film of Wagner's 'Die Nibelungen' in HDTV. Even this low level of activity may come as something of a surprise to an American readership, since Europe turned its back on HDTV a decade ago, after a disastrous attempt to mandate an analogue high-definition format known as HD-MAC. Since then, European digital television has been a standard-definition affair, the only enhancements consisting of a 16:9 aspect ratio, and surround-sound - neither of which is yet universally available. But it's clear that all that is about to change—and change pretty rapidly. By 2006, most of Europe's major pay-tv operators will be offering an HDTV service to European cable operators (see Table 1 below). So just how was Europe persuaded to perform such a drastic U-turn? Table 1: European Pay-TV Operators' HDTV Launch Plans
Source: Company announcements This writer first realized the European digital TV industry's tectonic plates were shifting during a visit to Berlin in June 2003, in an interview with public broadcaster ZDF's technical chief, Prof Albrecht Ziemer. He admitted that ZDF was facing a problem because of the boom in sales of DVD players and flat-panel TV sets in Germany. On the one hand, he said, viewers switching from watching a DVD movie to ZDF's standard-definition digital broadcasts were experiencing what he described as a "break in quality" - one which could only get worse as DVD migrated to a high-def standard. Flat-panel displays exacerbated the issue, he added, requiring a much higher data-rate than cathode-ray tubes to disguise the artefacts created by digital video compression: "This cannot be done with the [standard-definition] bit-stream we have now," he conceded - adding presciently, "We will have to do something in the second half of the decade." That "something" turned out to be HDTV. In some ways, Europe's broadcasters have only themselves to blame. When digital television launched here in the late '90s, improved picture and sound quality formed a major part of the sell. But since the European analogue transmission system, PAL, already delivered good quality 625-line images terrestrially, it turned out there was not much of an incentive for viewers to upgrade. The marketing message was subsequently re-focused on increased channel choice and exclusive, premium content - resulting in more and more channels being added to pay-TV operators' packages, at ever higher compression-rates. Not surprisingly, picture quality suffered. But as ZDF learned to its cost, viewers have long memories. They still associated 'digital TV' with 'quality', and the advent of DVD began to make many of them think they had been cheated. With good reception via a rooftop aerial, a PAL-standard transmission of a football match in Europe today is likely to look rather better than its MPEG-2 version. So one thing that's changed is - unlike ten years ago - there is now a groundswell of demand from European television viewers for better quality TV pictures. But the fact that major TV producers in Europe are increasingly being forced to invest in original high-def programming is also priming the HDTV pump. Speaking at a recent HDTV event hosted by Sony in London, producer Andy Quested, who works for the BBC's HD Support group, said the Corporation was being compelled to migrate to HDTV production because many foreign broadcasters refused to take its output in any other format. "The US is expecting us to produce in HD," he said. "And NHK won't buy classical music from us unless it's in HD." Quested also pointed out that the vast majority of the content the BBC acquired from abroad was available in HD at no additional cost. The Corporation - much of whose content, particularly in factual and natural history programming, is a natural candidate for high-res broadcasts - is accordingly planning to produce all its output in HDTV by 2010, said Quested. Despite such drivers, the creation of a vibrant HDTV sector in Europe will not be without its difficulties. First of all, unlike the USA, HD broadcasts are not mandated in Europe - nor are cable operators required to carry them. For Europe's Brussels-based legislators, it seems, the lesson was once bitten - twice shy. This laissez-faire attitude is matched at national level, with the regulators in most member states planning to leave the issue entirely to the marketplace to sort out. Characteristic of this approach is the attitude of Ofcom, the UK's equivalent of the FCC. At the same event where Quested detailed the BBC's HDTV plans, Andrew Stirling, Ofcom's manager for strategy development, told delegates "We're not here to drive the market. Our purpose is to create the flexibility to allow HD to happen." As far as Ofcom was concerned, both satellite and cable in the UK were already allowed to offer HDTV broadcasts, said Stirling, as long as they complied with internationally agreed standards. (In keeping with most other European countries, the digital terrestrial platform in the UK will not have enough capacity to broadcast HDTV programming until after analogue television has been switched off). Although, as Stirling indicated, there is an international ITU standard for HDTV, which defines a widescreen format with a resolution level of 1920 by 1080 pixels, the lack of regulatory intervention has meant that there is, as yet, no official European HDTV production or transmission standard cable operators can ready their networks for. In May 2004, the European Broadcasting Union caused something of a stir when it appeared to recommend only progressively-scanned formats - with 720p/50 as its preferred choice, followed by 1080p/50 at a later date. But after much argument behind the scenes during the IBC convention in Amsterdam in September 2004, an industry consensus has emerged to the effect that either 720p/50 or 1080i/25 will be acceptable options. Some American observers have expressed concern at the support for 720p: Joseph Flaherty, CBS's senior vice president of technology, flew in to deliver a well-received speech at the Sony event, where he pleaded for the adoption of the 1920 x 1080 ITU standard instead. "The European HD standard should be chosen for the maximum resolution on the largest TV set," he declared. But Europe's cable industry will probably attach more weight to a subsequent announcement in December 2004 by Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB platform, which can probably be regarded as the industry's bellwether. While - in line with the EBU - BSkyB allowed that progressively scanned picture formats are "better suited for the delivery of HDTV to the large screen, flat panel displays […] that are increasingly prevalent" - the operator revealed that the HDTV broadcasting system it is currently building will be able to support contributions and transmissions in either the 720p/50 or 1080i/25 formats, as will the HDTV set-top decoder it plans to launch in 2006. These two options look likely to constitute Europe's de facto HD format standard, and are certainly in line with an HDTV display standard that is emerging in parallel. Satellite operator SES Astra, which will be carrying most European pay-TV broadcasters' HDTV transmissions when they lift off, has recently succeeded in building a cross-sector consensus on the technical requirements any European TV display should have to fulfil in order to be able to carry an 'HD Ready' logo. These lay down a minimum of 720 physical lines in a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as certain specified types of HD-capable connector and copy protection (for the full 'HD Ready' specification, see Table 2). Table 2: Minimum requirements for 'HD Ready' TV displays in Europe
The following technical references apply:
Source: Astra SES Labelling of 'HD Ready' TV sets will represent a significant benefit for European consumers, since at present they have no easy way of telling which TV sets are 'HDTV future-proofed' and which ones are not. This is not a negligible issue, given industry estimates which suggest that around 40 per cent of flat-panel displays currently being sold in the EU are in fact already HD-compliant. Research consultancy Strategy Analytics reckons that around half a million of the flat-panel TVs sold in the EU in 2004 had a minimum screen resolution of 720 lines, and that by 2008 this will rise to 8.2 million units in terms of annual sales - equivalent to around half of all the flat-panel TVs being sold in the EU by that date. This is likely to act as another potent driver of HD take-up, since purchasers investing in what must still be viewed as expensive displays should be willing to pay a premium for content that will exploit their higher resolution levels. With the format debate just about settled, what Europe's cable operators need to know now is which HDTV coding system pay-TV operators are going to adopt, so they can plan the conversion of their head-ends. The HDTV service currently being broadcast in Europe via Euro1080 uses 1080i/25 and traditional MPEG-2 compression techniques. According to Thomas Wrede, VP Product Management at SES Astra, it's fairly simple, at least technically speaking, for cable operators to carry this type of service, which Astra delivers to their headends at 19Mbit/s using QPSK modulation. Since the European cable transmission standard (DVB-C) is closely related to the satellite standard (DVB-S), all they need to do is change the modulation to 64 QAM for delivery over their cable networks. However, says Wrede, the technology issue may be the least of their worries, because they're unlikely to have any spare bandwidth - especially in German and Benelux, where most of the cable networks have yet to be upgraded to 860 MHz. "If they do a one-to-one transmodulation, they waste half a cable channel," he points out (European cable channels typically take up 7 or 8 MHz of bandwidth, equivalent roughly to a data-rate of between 34 and 38 Megabits per second, depending on what's coming off the satellite). And there's little financial incentive for them to do so, concedes Wrede. The main rationale for those networks which do take the HD-1 service is "it shows subscribers they're up to speed with the latest technology. They can say they offer both broadband Internet and HDTV." It's left up to subscribers to decide whether to purchase an HD-capable cable converter. The cable economics will become a little more favourable for HDTV when the migration to advanced compression schemes such as H.264 (aka MPEG-4 Part 10) and VC1 (aka Windows Media 9) occurs. These can halve the bandwidth requirement for HD broadcasts, and DVB's new, more efficient satellite transmission technology, DVB-S2, is around 30 per cent more efficient than its predecessor. Euro1080 has already announced it's converting from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 in the summer of 2005, when it will also launch a new channel called HD-2 - but it's been the only operator so far to declare its hand. However, Nick Fielibert, Scientific-Atlanta's VP and CTO for Europe and Asia, is confident that most of the other operators will follow suit. "For HD, all indications are that [they] will start […] with MPEG-4," he says. Fielibert argues that there is little point in new European HDTV launches inaugurating their services with MPEG-2 - since operators will have to equip their subscribers with new set-top boxes for HDTV, anyway. They might as well go straight to MPEG-4, he believes. The industry consensus is that HD-capable MPEG-4 set-top box chipsets will likely start becoming available in volume in the summer of 2005. The decoders incorporating them will be hybrid affairs able to convert MPEG-2 as well as MPEG-4, since operators are unlikely to want to simulcast the digital channels they're currently broadcasting in MPEG-2 in the advanced format as well. It's also likely the boxes will follow the BSkyB model, being able to deal with both 720p and 1080i formats. For cable operators, it will be the introduction of these advanced set-top boxes that will represent the major expense involved in the transition to HDTV, not new equipment at the headend, according to Fielibert. "The transport stream that transports MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 is the same - there's no difference. It's only the content of the transport stream that may be different. It's even possible to multiplex MPEG-4 signals with MPEG-2 ones," he points out. Possibly the only new item of hardware they would need to purchase would be a new 'rate-shaping' device - if they were already using one. "Re-compressing a compressed signal in MPEG-4 is fundamentally different than in MPEG-2," he points out. "So that equipment would have to be changed." The only fly in the ointment is the current unavailability of real-time HDTV MPEG-4 encoders. While rival Tandberg Television demonstrated a prototype at IBC, Scientific-Atlanta hasn't got one yet - although Fielibert says it's on the "road-map". Such encoders will need to be able to transcode MPEG-2 HDTV source material into MPEG-4, as well as analogue content, since the majority of the world's HD programming is currently in the MPEG-2 format. Will European cable companies be prepared to make the investment in HDTV? Fielibert certainly thinks so, arguing that it will represent a competitive advantage for them. "Their main rivals in the future are not going to be [satellite operators]: I think they're going to be DSL [operators]. Since DSL is a bandwidth-limited network, DSL operators will have more difficulties deploying something with high bandwidth requirements like HDTV." Strategy Analytics certainly thinks so. Its VP and principal analyst, David Mercer, says "We're looking at the beginning of a mass-market [in HDTV] in Europe over the next three to four years." He predicts 12 per cent of European households will have HD-capable TV sets by 2008, of which around 3 million will be actually receiving HD services at that date. "By then, most major sports events will be in HD," he predicts. "And by 2010, high definition will be on track to become Europe's standard definition." Joseph Flaherty's message to his European colleagues probably put it best: "Join the resolution!" |
| Copyright © 2004 Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | ||
