The city of Amsterdam, Netherlands plays warm host to the International Broadcasting Convention each September. The 5-day conference is divided into five Theme Days covering Broadcasting by Broadband, Global Broadcast Markets, Digital Lifestyles, Content Production and Digital Cinema.
Over 1,300 exhibitors have signed up for IBC 2007, providing the world’s most comprehensive broadcast exhibition covering all aspects of content creation, management and delivery. The Exhibits will showcase the latest technology and foremost business ideas in broadcasting and new media.
IBC 2007 has its own media dedicated to reporting the event. This year coverage is supplied by the IBC Television News channel, Daily News magazine and online TV service.
Radio IBC, transmitting on 105.6FM, will broadcast for ten hours a day from 9am to 7pm, with live news and a mixture of live and pre-recorded discussion programs. There will be 10,000 pre-tuned personal FM tuners handed out to visitors and exhibitors, with a streaming service on the internet at www.radioibc.com and personalized RSS feeds.
A DVB-H mobile TV service available during IBC is being operated by SIDSA, using its Polar Plus head-end. The platform will be available over the entire RAI Centre, providing seven channels: BBC1, BBC2,BBC News24, BBC4, BBC3, Cbeebies and CBBC. Two of the DVB-H transmissions will be made from the Amsterdam Tower, situated 0.5km due south of the RAI Exhibition Centre, on UHF channels 23 and 28.
Also located within the Amsterdam Tower facilities, Qualcomm MediaFlo is providing a complete multiplexing and transmission system with 200W output power, transmitting with a centre frequency of 719MHz and a bandwidth of 6MHz.
Among other news at the big show, Microsoft will showcase its advanced media platforms to enable media and entertainment companies to create and manage media. Among the solutions the company will highlight at IBC are VC-1 encoding, Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Interactive Media Manager and Microsoft Mediaroom.
Sony’s PMW-EX1 XDCAM EX compact camcorder ($8,875), records high-definition video on two 16-megabyte PC Express solid-state memory cards. Each 16 GB “SxS PRO” card is capable of storing one hour of HD video (at 25 megabits per second).
