Logo Approved®
Arguably, the technical aspects of broadcasting are gradually getting better understood by a wide range of people. With the advent of digital television (and the slow march of services delivered over IP), more and more of it is built upon standards and specifications which have been well-known for quite some time (and in many cases, used directly by a great many people).
In theory, there’s a degree of convergence: the same decoder chips can be used both in your iPhone and a low-spec set-top box. Similarly, modern GPUs can perform H.264 decoding in hardware, just as an HD DVB receiver can.
There will always be differences and specialisms, of course, but the mechanics of decoding and rendering are pretty much the same whether it’s a decoded DVB-T stream, a bunch of RTP packets streamed across a network, or a file on a disk.
As worlds collide, it’s interesting to watch how the broadcasting industry is dealing with it.
It used to be simple: you’d buy a TV. It might support Teletext; it might be colour or black and white; and there’d be various features which would try to tempt you into picking one model over another. Broadly, though, you knew that a TV you bought in Dixons would work with the signals you were receiving over the air. You also knew that the sales staff, along with trying really hard to sell you an extended warranty and collect your details to pass on to TV Licensing, would very likely point out any major gotchas.
Although broadcasting is getting simpler, we’re in the midst of a transition. There are three competing interests in terrestrial alone: analogue, standard-definition digital (Freeview) and high-definition digital (Freeview HD). How’s a consumer supposed to know what to buy?
The answer lies in a series of campaigns and branding exercises, which individually might seem like a great idea, but are essentially flawed from a couple of different perspectives.
First, there’s a shift in message, from “you buy equipment, and it either works or it doesn’t” to “you should only buy properly-licensed branded equipment”. There’s a certain amount of sense to this, but it represents more than it would first appear. Specifically, as with most aspects of broadcasting, every technological advance is seized upon as a way of wrestling some control back from the consumer. This is almost always a double-edged sword.
Second, the message isn’t even particularly clear: should the TV or set-top box that you buy be branded “Digital”, “Freeview” or “Freeview HD”? What about Freesat? What about the other logos which adorn the boxes of receivers? Which combinations will work and which won’t? What if it has none of these?
Right now, consumers are told to look for the “Digital” logo first and foremost, but principally on TVs—it’s mostly assumed that STBs will be “Digital”-compliant anyway.
Then you have a choice of service: Freeview, Freesat, BT Vision, Virgin Media, Tiscali TV, and so on. With the exception of Freeview and Freesat, STBs are supplied by the provider meaning you don’t need to care anyway.
With Freeview vs Freesat, you pick based upon the type of service: terrestrial or satellite. This at least is relatively clear, but will get complicated as the digital switchover progresses and Freeview HD receivers start going on sale (yes, you can buy a Freeview HD box, and it’ll probably cost you more, but there’s not much point if you’re expecting to replace your STB before the switchover happens in your area).
The BBC, as shepherd of the digital switchover, is a key driving force behind all of this, although the other broadcasters and service providers are playing their part. There’s a potential conflict of interest here, in that the broadcasters produce both the technical specifications and the conditions attached to logo licensing programmes, and are also engaged in commercial negotiations with content providers in order to secure output which people want to watch on their services.
The risk here is that the pressure upon the broadcasters to placate the content providers (whether internal or external) can lead to conditions being attached to the licensing of the various approval logos which are, at best, misguided.
Licensing conditions aside, though, the problem remains that logo schemes aren’ t nearly as helpful as they should be, and it’s only going to get worse.
In an ideal world, there’d be a single branding scheme which could be applied to pretty much everything relevant, and showed three things:
- The fact the device is compliant with the specs
- Whether it’s just something which processes pre-decoded signals or an actual receiver (and if so, which kind: DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-C, IPTV)—in terms a consumer would understand
- What resolution it supports (SD, 720p, 1080i, 1080p)—again, in terms of a consumer would understand. You could even call them “Standard”, “Enhanced”, “High” and “Super” if you like.
Bonus points for a graduated colour-coding scheme to make this easy to spot.
That’s what the Digital Tick should have been: a single, concise, easy to understand approval/logo scheme which would see us through from when it all kicked off until 2015 or so, and beyond.
