Focusing on fruitful collaboration between ATSC and DVB

Emily Dubs, DVB’s Head of Technology, shared the podium with ATSC President Madeleine Noland in Bilbao this week at the IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting. Both were keynote speakers for the event and their presentations were followed by a wide-ranging discussion on opportunities for further collaboration between the two organizations.

The keynote presentation by Emily Dubs was on New DVB solutions for a time of transition, while her ATSC counterpart spoke about the adoption and evolution of ATSC 3.0. The session also included a talk by IEEE senior member Samina Husain on the Relevance, resilience and role of broadcast television.

The discussion that followed made clear that there is considerable scope for mutually beneficial cooperation between ATSC and DVB in the years ahead. It was pointed out that there are already areas where the organizations cooperate, for example, through DVB’s use of ATSC watermarking in its specification for targeted advertising or the consideration within ATSC of building on DVB’s work on profiling next generation video codecs.

Other areas for further discussion and possible collaboration included service discovery in a broadband context, where DVB-I provides a strong starting point, and emergency warning systems (EWS), where DVB could benefit from the work done by ATSC.

Emily Dubs and Madeleine Noland agreed on the need for the two organizations to present a unified face toward media distribution systems that are global in scope, such as the emerging 5G ecosystem.

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