Raad returns from DVB World
Munich in mid-March. A good place to be for Mohamad Raad.
Our standards representative traveled to the Bavarian capital to attend the annual gathering DVB World. Organized by the DVB Project, an industry-led consortium of media and tech companies, DVB World offered a hybrid conference and “unconference” format during its two days, 18 and 19 of March.
The conference featured media tech experts mainly from Europe and China, discussing the arena of media distribution technology and its affiliated concerns.
In Munich the conference part of the meeting focused on participants learning about DVB and the ecosystems that orbit it. Attendees batted around issues that centered on “what is in demand” and “what is falling out of favor,” according to Raad.
The un-conference portion of the DVB World symposium happened more free-form, allowing attendees (DVB members or not) to propose meeting session topics. Those sessions proceeded workshop-style, and the leader of the discussion steered participants toward answering questions they had in mind when suggesting the session.
Unlike other international standardization symposia at which Raad is a regular, DVB World operates as a discussion-based meeting.
“No technology is being evaluated (at DVB World) as in, say, an MPEG meeting. But participants are sharing insights into what is working and what isn’t,” said Raad.
Takeaways
Topics varied widely, as they would, given the subject’s spectrum, but the Unified researcher shared three key messages from the conference.
- The death of the broadcast model
“Basically, the broadcast model is no longer generating the returns that would justify further investment,” Raad said.
- The shift to streaming-based services
The need is real for existing broadcasters to switch away from traditional broadcasting methods. To remain competitive, the message is “internet first.”
- DVB-I’s significance to current and future investment
DVB-I is a “technical specification for an internet-centric way to signal and discover television services, whether they are delivered over broadband or broadcast. DVB-I enables those services to be presented in a unified manner on any connected device—from TV sets to personal consumer devices.” An example of the tech spec’s significance is the DVB-I based trial rollout that is starting in China, said Raad.
Asked what he enjoyed about the way DVB approaches standardization, Raad said he appreciates “the discipline of tying technical decisions to commercial requirements.”
This approach is “very different to the way that many SDOs (standards developing organizations) operate,” he said. “Any technical work has to be justified by commercial requirements at DVB, and any technical contribution is evaluated on the basis of whether or not it answers those requirements.”
Up next for Raad, in terms of global media standards development meetings, is MPEG 150, held online March 31–April 4, 2025.