“Although Luxembourg is perhaps best known in the television industry for being home to RTL and SES Astra, it has more to it that that,” says multimedia consultant Freddy Thys. It is an interesting situation that this country, with almost no domestic market for home produced programming, can be a significant player across Europe’s television industry: “we are home to several international companies,” Thys continues, “and I believe that there are significant international development opportunities that we can take advantage of.” Different technologies progress at different rates, however, and sometimes it is simply not feasible to maximise all of them at once into an optimised bundle, and television is no exception. There is potential quality for the viewer that cannot be achieved through current standard bandwidths for transmission, meaning certain things are lost between emission and reception. The potential of HD, in terms of picture, is not met by the reality because the transmission of data is neither efficient nor fast enough for optimised viewing. This does not mean that all HD transmissions are equal, but that some are better than others. And on a large scale, none are perfect. As things stand, optimisation is key.

The art of broadcasting

Despite the proliferation of niche channels available, television is a tough industry, and players in the market have to provide as many advantages as they can, at the lowest costs possible. “Standard definition TV is not good enough to convince viewers to change,” according to Jean-Paul Zaun, director of technology at Franco-German television station Arte. The channel started its HD service last year, and reaches approximately two million households in France alone, while Germany, potentially a huge market, will take off next year. He states that Arte have found out that transmission costs for HD, over “hundreds, even thousands of kilometres, are the same as for SD, and the end product is not affected by the distance.” This means that Arte can potentially send a transmission over P&TLuxembourg’s TERALINK fibre optic network from Strasbourg to Paris via London with no discernable decrease in quality or efficiency, at a price which works out at half that of other possible platforms. Moreover, the solution with TERALINK currently allows Arte to avoid signal compression through wider bandwidth between Strasbourg and Frankfurt. The optimal solution on a far wider geographical area is surely not far away, and the low cost and capabilities of TERALINK mean that it should be at the forefront of cutting-edge HD signal transmission.