DVB approves Next Generation Handheld Specification

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012
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New Specification Harnesses the Power of MIMO to Improve the Efficiency & Flexibility-of-Use of Broadcast Spectrum

GENEVA — The DVB Project is pleased to announce that at the 72nd Meeting of its Steering Board, approval was given to a new specification – DVB-NGH (Next Generation Handheld). Based on DVB-T2, there are many improvements and extensions in NGH to aid mobile and portable reception. These additional techniques include MIMO (Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output), Time Frequency Slicing (TFS) with a single tuner, non-uniform constellations, improved and extended LDPC codes for lower code rates, more efficient time interleaving and ultra-robust layer-1 signalling. It also covers a hybrid profile where terrestrial and satellite transmission schemes can be combined.

The specification will be submitted immediately to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) for formal standardisation and an NGH BlueBook is to be published.

Since the introduction of DVB-H, significant changes have taken place in the delivery and consumption of multimedia content. Initially, DVB-H was launched to provide linear broadcast services (e.g., TV and radio) for handheld devices. However, the multimedia content market is going through a profound change from traditional linear content consumption to a wide range of rich media content consumption. This rich media includes traditional TV (linear), various video and audio content, images and text messages as well as push download to local memory in the receiver. The delivery of the content has to keep pace with the user’s demand and user’s behaviour. DVB-NGH is designed to be the ideal solution for broadcast content delivery to handheld and mobile devices for the next decade.

“NGH covers the latest modulation as well as coding technologies and can be regarded as the most sophisticated terrestrial broadcast air interface. Furthermore it also offers additional operational flexibility, such as different protection for audio and video streams in one service” commented Peter Siebert, DVB’s Executive Director.