IBC 2008 Preview: Show Items to Note

Nagoya University in Japan has been working on free-viewpoint television, something that allows viewers effectively to be able to “move” the camera after a scene has been shot. But visitors to the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam this week won“t have to travel to Nagoya to see the effect. The university is one of the participants in the 2008 IBC New Technology Campus.

Another campus participant, Belgium“s VRT, allows viewers to create their own news shows. On a seemingly more mundane level, the Utrecht School of Music Technology in the Netherlands will demonstrate their version of loudness measurement.

The Television Research Institute of St. Petersburg, Russia, will demonstrate a video compression system said to be more efficient and 50 to 100 times faster than MPEG-4. Japan“s Nippon Television Network will demonstrate a 3D virtual world. But new technology at IBC is not limited to the New Technology Campus.

Thomson, for example, will feature five advanced-technology demonstrations of its own. One will demonstrate automatic reframing when switching between widescreen 16:9 and traditional 4:3 aspect ratios. Another will deal with lens aberration corrections in the digital domain, an area in which Astrodesign and Panasonic have previously introduced products.

The Digital Video Broadcasting Group will provide the first public demonstration of DVB-T2, a digital terrestrial transmission system said to offer as much as a 50 percent increase in spectrum efficiency (bits per channel) over DVB-T. And Hamlet will show test equipment that determines whether HDTV programming is likely to trigger an epileptic seizure.