Deloitte has identified five major forces for change impacting the global television broadcasting industry: big data; the second screen; spectrum allocation changes (in Europe); the commercialisation of ultra high definition TV and the emergence of the connected television receiver.

The Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standard is 20 years old. The DVB Project, the organisation that has overseen its development and its progress over the past two decades has been taking stock.

Telstra has complete proof of concept trials of ultra HD/4K transmission on the Telstra Digital Video Network (DVN2) in preparation for live trials in October.

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) is coming to Australia, and soon, and its being seen as a potential saviour for Australia’s struggling free-to-air TV industry. Just Google ‘HbbTV AND Australia’ and read the first few entries. Hybrid set to change TV - Sydney Morning Herald; Seven to start HbbTV by May - TV Tonight; HbbTV plan for Australia - Advanced Television; HbbTV coming your way soon, marrying Internet and broadcast - Financial Review.

Back in 2007 a handful of leading vendors along with major telcos AT&T and Telecom Italia joined forces to create the Open IPTV Forum (OIPF) with the goal of defining and publishing open and free standards for end-to-end Internet Protocol television (IPTV) services. OIPF has now grown to almost 50 members and the standards it has developed have come to underpin key components of the IPTV ecosystem.

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.