Meeting of the Transmission & Broadcasting Technical Committee
(Paris, 19 February 2000)
Present:

Neil Gilchrist (BBC, Vice Chairman)			neil.gilchrist @rd.bbc.co.uk
Harald Popp (Fraunhofer IIS)				popp@iis.fhg.de
Tim Shelton (AES)					timshelton@compuserve.com
Jens Spille (Thomson Multimedia)			spillej@thmulti.com
Jürgen Schmidt (Thomson Multimedia)		schmidtj@thmulti.com
Hermes Wördemann (Thomson Multimedia)		woerdermann@thmulti.com
Gerhard Stoll (IRT)					stoll@irt.de
Jürgen Herre (Fraunhofer IIS)			hrr@iis.fhg.de
Wieslaw Woszczyk (McGill University, Chairman of AES Technical Council)
							wieslaw@sound.music.mcgill.ca

The vice chairman presented a brief, informal account of the last meeting, in New York, and invited those present to indicate topics they wished to raise for discussion. The following is a brief record of the discussions.
1.	Exploitation of MPEG4 coding and MPEG 7 metadata in broadcasting
A demonstration of MPEG4 and MPEG7 techniques should be available in time for the New York Convention in the fall of 2001.  Gerhard Stoll briefly mentioned the activities of the SAMBITS project, which should be in a position to provide this.
2.	Internet Broadcasting
Tim Shelton asked what listeners’ expectations should be of the technical quality from audio programme material accessed via the internet.  Were listeners happy with the quality?
Gerhard Stoll suggested that people accessed audio via the internet initially out of curiosity.  They did not tend to listen for more than 15 minutes at a time and often did not return.  This was not necessarily a reaction against the quality of internet audio. One factor might be the cost of internet access, compared with free radio broadcasts.
Jens Spille pointed out that the ability to access broadcast material at a time convenient to the listener could be important.
Wieslaw Woszczyk expressed the opinion that ease of access and the ability to access very remote sources would maintain interest in internet broadcasting.  He reminded the meeting that these issues and any others arising in Gerhard Stoll’s workshop later in the convention could be recorded in a paper and posted on the AES’ web site by the Technical Council.  He invited Gerhard to consider this.
3.	Metadata
Interest is growing among broadcasters in the use of metadata. One or two papers have been presented at AES conventions, and some applications have been discussed in AES standards groups.  Standardisation of some types of metadata would be beneficial, in allowing broadcasters to exchange readily supplementary information on programme content, rights, etc.  The SMPTE has begun to consider this, but to date there does not seem to be the same level of interest in the AES.
N.H.C. Gilchrist.