Videoage International November 2021

6 World V I D E O A G E November 2021 (Continued from Page 4) will remain in MPEG-2 for a while, but will be simulcast in HD MPEG-4 AVC. On the Mediaset front, Canale 5, Italia 1, and Rete 4 elected to remain with the old standard until October 20, 2021, and are simulcast in MPEG-4 AVC. The roadmap of the other broadcasters is not yet known. In 2023 there will be a second transition to the new DVB-T2 standard that only TV sets sold in the last few years will be capable of receiving. Thanks to the HEVC/H.265 video com- pression codec that forms the DVB-T2, viewers will be able to watch FTA TV programs in 4K Ultra HD, and will be ready for 8K. In 2023, the current 700 MHz frequency band occupied by FTA channels will be freed for 5G mobile phones. NBC’s Lost Love for The Globes R eps for the U.S. TV net- work NBC have said that they will not air the Golden Globe Awards in 2022. In 2021, 6.9 million NBC viewers in the U.S. tuned in for the most recent Hollywood Foreign Press Association event, significantly less than the 18.4 million who watched the 2020 outing. (The Oscars only managed 9.85 million last year versus 23.6 million in 2020). Still, in this day and age, those numbers are considered good. Could NBC have realized that audiences for awards shows have, of late, been falling off and advertisers might not be as attracted to them as before? NBC could have also pulled out because of the concurrent Critics Choice Awards, which is a TV salvo against the HFPA. Alternatively, NBC execs might do a 180-degree turn- about once they realize that losing even one year of the Golden Globes will give an advantage to the Critics Choice Awards, which is broadcast on The CW TV network (and will also air on TBS). In this case it might be better for NBC to simply air the show, thereby keeping the audience and ad- vertisers happy, and ensuring the Globes’ future. L ast month, Italy introduced a new digital TV standard, its second in 10 years. And for many TV sets purchased before 2018 a new decoder is needed (which will cost an average of 35 euro or U.S. $40). The transition is taking place in two stages and covers the whole of Europe, but at different schedules (see the map where Italy is one of the latest to switch to the new TV standard). The new TV standard (called DVB-T2) has higher compression, therefore less bandwidth will be needed to have better HD reception than the DVB-T standard (which was introduced in 2012). However, the problem is the encoding (or compression), which currently is the MPEG-2 standard in both HD and SD. This is not compatible with the newMPEG-4. In effect, there are two issues. The first one is that TV sets sold before 2011 can only receive MPEG-2, and TV receivers sold before 2018 cannot receive DVB-T2. Therefore new decoders will be needed until new sets can be purchased. The new standard will move on to MPEG-4 AVC. The transition to MPEG-4 had a soft launch in October. State-owned RAI-1, RAI-2, RAI-3, and Rainews24 A New European TV Standard Introduced in Italy