Media Web Symposium keeps DVB-I in focus

The 11th Media Web Symposium brought 230 participants together at the Fraunhofer FOKUS institute in Berlin last week to discuss internet-based media delivery. Given the topic, it was natural that DVB-I, the specification for internet-based service discovery, cropped up in various ways throughout the event.

A demonstration from the German public broadcaster ARD showed how DVB-I enables seamless integration of 5G Broadcast popup channels. The demo used live 5G Broadcast transmissions from the Berlin-Scholzplatz tower, with the service instances integrated into the service list of the ongoing German DVB-I Pilot. It showed how the service prioritization function of DVB-I can be used so that the 5G Broadcast service instances would be selected by devices capable of receiving such broadcasts while regular TV sets could simply ignore them. The DVB-I client in the smartphone received other regular services via unicast.

On the first day of the MWS, Stefan Krüger and Remo Vogel of rbb, the Berlin-based arm of ARD, gave a presentation on the demo and the German DVB-I Pilot during a session on 5G Media – Standards and Technologies.

Another demo that showed the versatility of DVB-I was Fraunhofer FOKUS’s Metaverse Testbed, described as a “playground for your metaverse experiences”. The tool, which facilitates the rendering and streaming of computationally intensive 3D applications across any device, makes use of DVB-I to present streams in an XR (extended reality) player.

DVB Head of Technology Emily Dubs spoke during the main conference day at MWS, picking up some of the themes from her recent NAB conference paper in a talk titled “5G Broadcast among other terrestrial broadcast systems: merge, interwork or compete?”.

She was also a panellist for the traditional update on standarization activities, representing the DVB Project alongside counterparts from SVTA, 3GPP, MPEG, Metaverse Standards Forum, DASH-IF, CTA-WAVE, HbbTV Association and W3C. Among the topics raised by the audience, the way the media industry is addressing sustainability was a particular concern. In this context, the difficulty of comparing energy data accurately was acknowledged by panellists.

Find out more about the Media Web Symposium here.