Almost one year on from the World Cup and the launch of HD in Europe, high definition television is – or should now be – part of every broadcaster’s strategic planning. The viewing public is buying flat-panel displays in huge volumes. It is a time of dramatic change for production studios and outside broadcast content capture, writes Fergal Ringrose.
New production, distribution and consumer technology is fundamentally changing the way television programming is made and distributed – and high definition is leading this charge. Building on the success of our initial HD conference last year, HD Masters 2007 on June 25 & 26 at RIBA in London (again presented by TVBEurope and SMPTE & BKSTS), is perfectly timed to deliver hard-won ‘real world’ experiences to would-be HD broadcasters and producers – and also to bring into sharp focus the very real challenges still to be overcome. It is ‘adapt or die’ time for the industry.
HD Masters 2007 brings together acknowledged HD experts, with real-life case studies, and the latest thinking on acquisition, compression, storage and distribution of HD material. No HD conference would be complete without further debate on the topic of image formats and the implications for complexity and bandwidth demands. This event will also look forward to analogue switch-off across Europe and beyond, and the prospects for HD being delivered terrestrially as well as via satellite, cable and DSL-based technologies.
This year’s programme content is led by John Ive, former director of Strategic Planning at Sony Europe. Ive is a fellow of the RTS and SMPTE, a Director of the Professional MPEG Forum, and Vice Chairman of the IBC Council. He is supported in content planning by TVBEurope Editor Fergal Ringrose and also by Chris Forrester, a respected senior broadcast industry journalist and co-director of three HDTV Summit business conferences from 2004 to 2006.
Please put those dates in your diary now! June 25 & 26, RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), Portland Place, London W1. The HD Masters 2007 provisional programme will be available at the end of this month.
