The SCTE Benelux Lecture Meeting at IBC 2005.

The Society's Benelux Section Lecture Meeting at IBC 2005 The Benelux Chapter of the SCTE met once again at IBC. This was our sixth European lecture meeting and the fourth to be organised by the Benelux section. This SCTE Benelux lecture presentation was organised by Mr Rien Baan, our Benelux Secretary. SCTE President, Dr. Roger Blakeway, summarises the day's papers. You can right click on the paper names to download the presentations slides. Please note these presentations may be very large files and, if you are not on a broadband connection, may take a long time to download.

SCTE Benelux Chairman, Aart Verbree, Secretary, Rien Baan and the rest of the Committee.

Colin Philips, ntl.	New Video Distribution Technologies The Benelux group of the SCTE held its annual lecture on Tuesday 13 September 2005 at the RAI Exhibition & Congress Centre in Amsterdam in conjunction with IBC. The meeting, entitled "New Video Distribution Technologies" was the fourth organised by Mr Rien Baan, our Benelux Secretary, but the sixth in our series of European Lecture Meetings. With attendee numbers approaching the hundred mark the Chairman, Aart Verbree of CAI Westland who was recently made a Knight in The Order of Orange-Nassau, welcomed delegates and introduced the speakers for the day.

Summary of the Presentations First off was David Keeley, Chief Technology Officer, Motorola CHS, EMEA with a paper on "Distributing Digital Content within the Home" - which addressed the challenges Network Oerators will face as the migration from Analogue to Digital services gathers pace around Europe in providing cost effective methods for distributing and sharing content within the home. Additional TV receivers have traditionally been served by simply splitting RF input cables, and distributing the Analogue signals, an approach no longer possible with digital signals. One approach to service additional TVs would be to provide each one with its own Set top terminal, the cost of these terminals verses the revenue they generate does not necessarily create an attractive business model. Mr Keeley looked at other distribution technologies and introduced some of the possible solutions. Following on from Mr Keeley's paper there was a description of the service provided by Euro1080, the first commercial HDTV provider in Europe. The paper, "HDTV in Europe: Did cable lose the fight before it even started?", was given jointly by Mr Jacques Schepers, External Technical Director, Euro1080 and Mr Yves Panneels, their Corporate Affairs & Media Relations Manager. By the end of 2005 and early 2006 a number of large media companies would start broadcasting in HDTV and it is expected that numerous commercial and public broadcasting stations will make the move to High Definition in the following 12 months. On the Cable front the debate on cable bandwidth and delivery methods have just begun and major strategic decisions will have to be taken for HDTV channels to be offered via cable. On the other hand, satellite and IP providers are keen on distributing HDTV signals and have less obstacles to market.		David Keeley, Motorola.

Ir Ger Bakker, UNET	Summary of the Presentations After a break for coffee, kindly sponsored by Technetix, Ir. Ger Bakker, Founder and CTO, UNET gave a paper on the "Almere Fiber Pilot, Experiences with Broadcast IPTV" In Almere, The Netherlands, UNET has started the first fully digital Triple Play Service within the country, including 30 Mb/s internet access, more than 70 TV channels and free IP Telephony. Development started in 2003 and introduced a stable service to the public during the summer of 2004. The provision of a reliable IPTV service with bit rates from 3 - 12 Mb/s over an IP/Ethernet infrastructure presented interesting challenges and the paper covered design and development issues, passive and active network architectures, service architecture and operational experiences during those two years to provide broadcast TV over an entirely Ethernet based network infrastructure to homes and businesses. Ger Bakker also discussed switching and routing, high-speed IP streams and Quality of Service, settop boxes, TV servers, packaging of the programmes and web based self-provisioning for the customer. The final presentation of the day was by Mr Colin Phillips, Manager TV Solutions, ntl Home and recipient this year of an SCTE-IBC Bursary, on "Deploying VOD in Europe - Challenges, Optimisations & Results". ntl commenced its VOD service in January 2005 and is now Europe's biggest VOD provider. The presentation looked at the challenges of adding VOD to an existing heterogeneous HFC network, how careful consideration of the architecture, components and asset encoding has lead to significant cost savings. Mr Phillips provided an invaluable insight as to viewing patterns and the response of the customer base to this new service.

Thanks. In his closing remarks the Chairman, Aart Verbree, thanked the speakers, the IBC organisation for providing the facilities and Technetix for their sponsorship of refreshments. He reminded delegates that these lectures were provided for SCTE members and, although attendance was open to all IBC visitors, he exalted non-members to join and support the Society. For details of membership and access to online application forms please see the Non-Members area of this site.



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