The broadcast industry is getting back on its feet after the effects of the downturn and the September 11 attacks in 2001. The focus has been moving back to the hardware and infrastructure issues, and new technologies are starting to take commercial shape. Nick Flaherty reports.

Researchers at the BBC, BT and four UK universities have developed an end-to-end chain for the generation, distribution and display of 3D graphic and video images.
Under the Prometheus project, part of the UK government's Link programme, the researchers have combined various research programmes to create a chain that could work with today's existing virtual studios.
Facial modelling and motion capture techniques developed by BTexact Technologies are being used to animate the faces. This uses two photographs and image processing to automatically locate 257 key features used for the animation. This work has been linked to the human body modelling and capture developed at the University of Surrey. These have generated photorealistic models using multiple cameras and a 'blue screen' background to separate out the actor from the background and are turned into 3D graphical representations of the actor, called avatars.
Modelling clothes is also computationally intensive. The researchers at University College London have developed a real time cloth simulation system running on a 1.4GHz Pentium PC using an approximate derivation from finite element methods rather than the more common rectangular grid. This different approach allows arbitrary 3D meshes to be used so that modellers can design one piece items of clothing around an avatar.
The simulator models the forces on each point and solved as differential equations, and the team also developed a cloth-body collision system that can run at the 750MHz required to produce the 25 frame/s simulation of clothing built with 400 polygons.
These are combined and the video, or graphical representations inserted into video using technology from the BBC. The video is distributed using the MPEG4 standard, inserting the different video, graphics, audio and control streams using the MPEG4 Binary Format for Scenes (BIFS) protocol and Java using an encoder and decoder developed at Queen Mary College at the University of London.
All this is being displayed on a 3D display without special viewing glasses developed at de Montford University in Leicester. This uses a technique called Integral Imaging where a high definition 2D image is displayed behind an array of microlenses that each act as a 'directional pixel'. The trick has been to render a series of images from a range of different viewpoints and multiplex these together to match the structure of the lens array. This maintains the integral nature of the image so that information about a spatial point is contained in all adjacent microlenses.
And as the final link in the project, UK video production equipment experts Snell & Wilcox are looking at the commercial possibilities. Meanwhile Philips has demonstrated a prototype system that uses a mobile phone as a return path and charging mechanism for digital TV.
By connecting a GPRS mobile phone into the back of a digital set top box using the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) standard, the return path can be used for MHP applications such as betting on football, live quiz shows and even voting on the Eurovision song contest, says the company.
That connection could be through an infrared link or a dedicated serial connection, but Philips sees the most likely connection as a Bluetooth wireless link to a phone already in the house.
Philips says a number of major broadcasters and network operators have already expressed major interest in mobile return channel technology, including those based on GSM, GPRS and DECT. In addition to voting, betting and polling, using a mobile phone also taps into the existing billing infrastructure and the return channel in the set top box can be personalised to the profile of that user. This means that, irrespective of location, the person using the service pays for it. Naturally this has appealed to the operators who want to reduce their cost of operation, but may not appeal to people once they check their mobile phone bills.
In the radio industry, a consortium of 75 European companies is aiming to replace long, medium, and short wave radio with a digital version over the next two to five years. Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) has demonstrated its first receivers with prototype software for a PC receiver which is set to be released to enthusiasts at the end of the year. the delay is to allow for testing, but the aim of the software is to encourage enthusiasts to test the coverage of the new technology.
DRM uses 10KHz channels in the existing MW and shortwave bands to carry MPEG4 data and, unlike the Digital Audio Broadcast standard, would have one radio station per channel. Such a system has a longer range than DAB (the other digital radio technology), with a demonstration in Amsterdam of receiving a digital radio channel from Canada.
Chipsets for receivers are being developed by Micronas and Atmel in Germany and the set was put together by Coding Technologies, a spin off from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. "We can expect the first consumer receivers in 2004," said Stefan Meltzer, vice president of business development at Coding Technologies.
Backed by the BBC World Service in the UK, the technology is set to receive its ETSI standard by the end of the year. An ITU version of the standard is expected early next year.