ATVEF Weds TV to Internet.

Italy was venue of presentation

A team of four experts flew to Italy recently to demonstrate the virtues of the Advanced Television Enhanced Forum (ATVEF) to a cross-section of Italian multimedia executives. Held in the resort town of Giulianova on the east coast of the Abruzzo region, the demonstration to some 50 people in the broadcasting, Internet and programming businesses followed similar exhibitions previously held by ATVEF in England, Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland and the U.S. The ATVEF experts in Giulianova were: Joey Hougham of Intel and Ruston Panabaker of Microsoft, both Americans; Eric Le Bihan of NetGem in France; and Malcolm Kelley of Intel in Germany.

ATVEF was founded by 14 companies including NBC, Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, Intel and Microsoft. The ATVEF Web-based protocol allows broadcasters around the world to offer consumer incentives to digital television by adding Internet services. Today 85 companies in 11 countries have adopted the ATVEF protocol.

The main reason for selecting the Abruzzo region for this demonstration was the pressure that the Italian government placed on local television stations to switch to digital transmission in order to alleviate the ecological problem of high electromagnetic pollution generated by the region's many TV stations transmitting at high power. Digital television transmissions are immune to interferences; therefore, the power it takes to operate digital broadcasts can be lowered by an average of up to 30 times what is currently used.

In comparison to other venues, according to one ATVEF specialist, the Italian presentation was better attended than the one held in Geneva, Switzerland. In association with the Giulianova municipality, Video Age helped coordinate the event.

At the demonstration in Giulianova, local politicians were also present, as well as Franco Gerardini, a member of the Italian Parliament, and members of the Italian and international press. Among the attendees were Giovanni Celsi, representing RAI International; Rosario Ponzio from Warner Bros. International Television in Italy; Marco Rossignoli from AER, the association of Italy's local TV stations; Domenico Marcozzi, the secretary general of the association of journalists from the Abruzzo region; and various college professors. The event was webcast live on www.canaleweb.net and received wide print and TV coverage at the local, national and international levels.

However, the goal of engaging representatives of the Italian government with the broadcast and Internet communities was not fully achieved. Vincenzo Vita, the Italian deputy minister of Telecommunications, canceled his participation and instead sent a message that was read by the mayor of Giulianova, Giancarlo Cameli.

According to some analysts, the reason the government bailed out can be attributed to the fact that Italy doesn't yet have a clear policy on digital television (see accompanying story on page 22). By not being at the ATVEF demonstration, the government possibly avoided being embarrassed by probing questions to which they couldn't provide adequate answers yet.

Each of the ATVEF representatives offered a tailored presentation: Intel, as the developer of computer chips housed in television broadcast and receiving equipment; Microsoft, as the supplier of software product; and NetGem, as the manufacturer of set-top boxes that allow TV sets to both receive digital-TV broadcasts and to connect to the Internet.

To some of the participants present in Giulianova, such as Franco Visintin, chairman of the Italian chapter of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), the ATVEF protocol does not go far enough, especially when considering all its potential. Currently, ATVEF recommends only the HTML standard that enables Internet elements to be delivered together with analog or digital broadcast television signals. In view of the existence of the world's two digital-TV standards: the American ATSC and the European DVB, some broadcasters were counting on ATVEF to come up with a unified, universal digital-TV format for all platforms (terrestrial, satellite, cable and phone lines).

The American digital-TV standard has been judged inadequate, as it is bogged down by technical, consumer and standardization issues. The major obstacle facing ATSC in the U.S. is transmission problems. Using the ATSC single-carrier transmission (called 8-VSB) causes the digital-TV signal to disappear every time there are multipath interferences (ghosts). The ATSC transmission is also unsuitable for transmitting from and/or getting reception to moving vehicles. Some U.S. TV station groups want to solve these problems by officially adopting the European DVB standard transmission (called COFDM) which uses multiple carriers (up to 8,000).

Another issue facing the ATSC standard is that the audio-visual portion of the TV signal can have one of 18 configurations (the broadcaster can choose its preference). The fact that U.S. broadcasters can't agree on one single digital-TV configuration spells increased costs for the TV receiver that must now be able to adapt to various transmission configurations.

Considering that by the year 2006, all the 1,605 U.S. TV broadcasters have to give up analog transmissions and become fully digital (simulcasting with analog-TV frequencies must cease by then since these frequencies have already been re-allocated). One can understand the pressing dilemmas facing U.S. TV stations.

Finally, there is the consumer problem. As it currently stands in the U.S., consumers are nor motivated to buy either digital-to-analog converters or digital-TV sets, since they will be receiving the same television programs that are now broadcast in analog format. To be fair, this same problem is also being faced by European broadcasters. An ATVEF-compliant television transmission could alleviate such issues by offering added Internet services to the consumer (those who own set-top boxes).

The SMPTE's Italian chairman Visintin has invited ATVEF members to stage another exhibit in Milan, Italy, before a group of television engineers in order to hammer out answers to questions posed by digital TV broadcasters, such as resolution, bandwidth and compression. ATVEF seems reluctant to get involved with these elements.

In any case, one of the ATVEF characteristics that impressed most of the participants at the Giulianova exposition was the fact that the ATVEF protocol allows broadcasters to transmit television programs with multiple-link, Internet-style information without requiring the classic return path. This return path, however (via phone lines now and wireless later) will be compulsory for more complex interactivity such as e-commerce.z