Hybrid Brazilian-Japanese DTV Standard Not Seen Spreading in Latin America
The hybrid Brazilian-Japanese DTV standard emerging from an agreement between those 2 countries probably won’t be adopted by any other Latin American countries, said Peter MacAvock, exec. dir-DVB Project. Details of the standard are still emerging, but observers believe it will incorporate aspects of Brazilian and Japanese technology, MacAvock said: “Our impression is it’s basically a system that cherry picks the Japanese system… That’s fine, but that’s no longer an international standard.”
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A rumored Toshiba semiconductor factory for Brazil doesn’t appear to be included in the agreement, said ATSC Forum Chmn. Robert Graves, who had been pushing Brazil to adopt the U.S. standard. Toshiba didn’t respond to our e- mail. “As I understand it, the Japanese have not made any commitments” along those lines, he said. Political pressure by one of Brazil’s largest media companies, TV Globo, helped spur the agreement, he said: “In an election year, the government was not going to cross Globo.”
Brazil’s new standard is the least likely to be adopted by surrounding Latin American countries, said MacAvock. “The Japanese standard has not been considered by any countries in Latin America so far,” he said: “We don’t see the Latin American countries en masse adopting the Brazilian solution.” The DVB Project will maintain a presence in Brazil to address interoperability issues between terrestrial broadcast, DBS and cable systems, MacAvock said. The group will also continue to push adoption of DVB-H as a standard for mobile DTV, he said: “I think the mobile TV appetite [in Brazil] will not necessarily be met by the standard they have chosen.
The ATSC Forum is shifting resources out of Brazil and into countries such as Chile, Argentina and Columbia, said Graves. “In a way, it’s almost a blessing that Brazil has finally made its decision… but it certainly is a big disappointment to us,” he said. In Chile, broadcasters have asked the govt. to adopt the ATSC standard and stations in Guatemala have begun broadcasting in ATSC despite the lack of govt. action there, Graves said. “I think you'll see 2 or 3… countries make a decision by the end of the year.”
Brazil’s decision could affect consumer electronics manufacturers because the standard uses the H.264 video codec rather than MPEG-2, said David Glidden, Harris’ dir.-TV strategy & business development. “I think we may start to see regulators [in other countries] making decisions to go with H.264 because they would view it as a more efficient encoding algorithm,” he said. If the global market for DTV becomes more fractured, that would mean complications for device makers, he said.
Harris expects to continue doing business in Brazil, Glidden said. “I believe there will be opportunities for transmitter manufacturers other than Japanese manufacturers,” he said. Brazil is a large enough market to make economic sense for Harris to support it, even if other Latin American countries don’t adopt the Brazilian standard, he said: “From a technological standpoint, the ability to implement a variant [on a DTV standard] is not too difficult.”