Across Asia, the digitisation of visual/screen-based entertainment is at the epicentre of a wave of change in viewer behaviour. An ever-broadening range of digital viewing options – including cable TV, direct-to-home (DTH) satellite, IPTV, terrestrial television and mobile TV – are vying for viewer attention, presenting both challenges and opportunities for industry stakeholders who will need to adapt in the year ahead. Modern consumers, particularly the Asian youth market, demand a different viewing experience all together from the passive armchair TV viewing of their forebears. The twin progeny of digitisation – personalisation and interactivity – have created a new environment where the viewing experience can be tailored and enjoyed across multiple platforms. This is an entirely new viewing dimension, and the foundation of the so-called ‘lean forward’ viewing behaviour. Now throw into the mix two ‘elephants in the room’ – mobile TV and broadband Internet. These applications untether the viewer from the sitting room, and spawn another distinct cultural shift. Coming to grips with these core generational viewing changes will underpin the viability of strategic planning and business models in 2009. The modern ‘broadcaster’ The most effective future business models will therefore be rich and complex, founded on new and exciting collaborations. In the past, the broadcast sector was simple and vertically integrated, with the broadcaster responsible for production, aggregation, distribution and delivery, typically to a small and familiar audience. It enjoyed secure viewer-allegiance, and was typically delivered by a single platform. In contrast, the ‘broadcaster’ of today must address: multiple delivery mechanisms and viewing platforms; a wide range of content sources; an equally wide range of ‘stakeholders’, each of which may be competitor or collaborator; and, perhaps most importantly, a vast global audience that exhibits less brand allegiance, and is increasingly discerning and demanding. The reality today as industries converge is that no single group can bring together all the skills and capital required for sustained commercial success. Collaborations, ingenuity and, most importantly, leveraging the skills of specialists, will be essential ingredients. Specialists will operate on all fronts in our industry: content creation, aggregation, distribution, management, delivery and infrastructure development and management. This paradigm shift in the screen-based entertainment industry reflects many other industries, where the global trend is towards skills refinement, specialisation and outsourcing. Transforming terrestrial transmission In such an environment, terrestrial broadcast platforms need to continue evolving to ensure they remain competitive against other delivery platforms such as cable, satellite and IPTV. Viewers are demanding higher quality services and the choice of more channels – plus increasingly the ability to receive broadcast television on mobile handsets. As a result, new technologies are emerging to sustain terrestrial broadcast platforms. One such is the recently released second-generation digital video broadcasting – terrestrial (DVB-T2) standard, which joins China’s digital multimedia broadcast – vterrestrial/handheld (DMB-T/H) standard in offering a dramatically improved capacity over DVB-T, along with increased robustness of the signal. These promise greater options for broadcasters, as they provide more flexibility to support multi-channelling, and stand to make high-definition television (HDTV) broadcasting a more viable option for terrestrial broadcasters. In the realm of terrestrial interactivity, the experience depends on whether or not there is a return path. Without a return path, the viewing experience can still be enhanced, courtesy of carousel-style datacasting services, where IP data is broadcast and cached within a specially designed set-top box (STB) and interrogated. However, hybrid internet-connected STBs are likely to become commonplace in the coming years, providing an in-built backchannel ‘conduit’ that will allow even greater personalisation of the viewing experience. This is all good news for terrestrial broadcasters, who can hope to grow audiences and establish new revenue streams through charging for some of these services. Additionally, the introduction of new channels-perhaps even containing themed programming-can attract more advertising dollar. By exploring the delivery of new types of services, broadcasters can enhance their relationship with viewers. Next-generation network Significantly, changes are also afoot in terrestrial network design. Partly driven by the needs of mobile TV networks, where a more distributed topology is favoured to achieve the required coverage, terrestrial broadcast infrastructure is looking likely to undergo a metamorphosis to meet the needs of high-density living environments. Multilevel residential condominiums in cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong are typically serviced by master antenna TV systems, which have recently shown signs of not standing up to the performance requirements of digital television. This has led to the consideration of mechanisms for broadcasting DTV signals to be received in apartments while bypassing master antenna systems-in short, contemplation of a new generation of transmission network specifically targeting such high-density environments. We are entering a new era of terrestrial broadcasting-an era that not only demands DTV in multilevel condos, but also demands TV reception on handheld and portable devices. The next generation of transmission network is likely to satisfy all these demands simultaneously. It will provide a common network infrastructure for broadcasting HD and SDTV signals for fixed, portable and mobile reception, without the need for external receive antennas. One possible network architecture takes the form of a metro distributed transmission network (DTN), building on concepts developed for mobile TV coverage. The year 2009 is thus likely to see a new generation of transmission network architecture take shape. Although still in the refinement stage, the DTN promises much for the future. Just as the screen-based entertainment industry is metamorphosing into a different dynamic entity, so too is terrestrial transmission infrastructure making the leap into the future. TVAplus