CombiTel goes to Amsterdam for IBC 2013

This month CombiTel will be participating with its vendor partners in the International Broadcasting Convention, IBC 2013, to be held in Amsterdam. More than 50,000 broadcasting industry professionals from over 160 countries engaged in the content creation, management and delivery of electronic media and entertainment will descend on Amsterdam for the event.

CombiTel managing director, Eugene Razbash, said: “IBC is the leading global tradeshow for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of broadcasting media and entertainment. The event's unparalleled exhibition and agenda setting conference encompass the very latest developments in multimedia content creation, delivery and management.”

He added: “After the show we will be previewing the latest technologies at combitel.com.au and we’ll be talking about the Introduction of HbbTV in to the Australian market, which is very exciting.”

According to the web site dedicated to the technology, HbbTV will enable consumers to access new services from entertainment providers such as broadcasters, online providers and consumer equipment manufacturers – including catch-up TV, video on demand, interactive advertising, personalisation, voting, games and social networking as well as programme-related services such as digital text and EPGs.

Also featuring prominently at IBC in Amsterdam will be the new video coding standard, HEVC, ratified earlier this year and tipped to revolutionise the delivery of video services thanks to its much greater compression efficiency.

The standard, generally known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was developed jointly by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the International Telecommunication Union’s Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). The ITU’s official designation for it is Recommendation ITU-T H.265 (the ITU does not produce standards, only ‘recommendations’). Within MPEG it goes by the mouthful ‘ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2’.

The initial version of HEVC is focussed on consumer applications and for this purpose three profiles have been defined:

• Main, an all-purpose profile with a depth of eight bits per pixel, supporting the video format most widely used by consumer devices;
• Main10, an extension of the bit depth to 10 bits per pixel, which is well suited to consumer applications such as Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) where very high quality is critical;
• Main Still Picture, which is used for still images and carrying a single still picture at a depth of 8 bits per pixel.

The first implementations of HEVC are expected to be in services to mobile devices and multi-screen TV over unmanaged networks thanks to the traditional bandwidth constraints of these networks and the quicker replacement cycles of client devices.

Implementing H.265 is not without its challenges. Real-time decoding can take 1.5 to 2 times as much processing power as decoding H.264/MPEG-4 and encoding can take four times as much. However most current desktops, laptops and smartphones should be capable of decoding standard high definition video (1080p) encoded with HEVC.

Software decoders were already available for download that are able to decode HEVC video on current smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy S4 ships with an inbuilt HEVC codec.

The IBC 2013 conference will be held on 12th - 17th September 2013 and the exhibition will be held on 13th - 17th September 2013.

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