iBC, on Friday morning in Amsterdam, is scheduled to see a spectacular Super HDTV demonstration, a world first, where signals are transmitted from London to Amsterdam’s RAI conference and exhibition centre. The live BBC and NHK signals will be fed via fibre and satellite between the two locations.

Siemens (the old BBC Technology arm) is handling this experimental format of the future which is 16 times the resolution of High Definition TV and was developed by NHK, Japan's public broadcaster. Project management for the London demonstration will be in the hands of Siemens IT Solutions and Services, who have designed, tested and implemented the IT and Broadcasting infrastructure.

Part of the overall circuitry is also coming from Eutelsat which is supplying a pair of satellite transponders for the exercise. This portion of the scheme is handled by SIS Live (formerly BBC Outside Broadcast). Italy’s RAI is also involved. At RAI’s research centre in Turin the content will also be played into the IBC demonstrations, compressed using multiple MPEG-4 encoders to a bitrate of 140Mb/s. Eutelsat is providing two full transponders on Atlantic Bird 3 to carry the signal to Amsterdam.

These first international SHV Video over IP optical transmissions are taking place from City Hall in London to the NHK Super HDTV Demonstration Theatre in Amsterdam. The BBC Research and Innovation division has been working for many years with NHK. The BBC additionally is supplying its DIRAC compression technology for the service.

The live feeds will be carried via the Siemens London Media Gateway and 1Gbit/s international links from partner Cable&Wireless. Siemens and Cable&Wireless say they have worked together to supply a resilient circuit architecture which would provide error free and minimal IP packet jitter and loss for the transmission. Then Siemens subjected the circuits to testing, using not only the standard IP network testers, but also techniques developed with WAN and LAN tests for the transmission of streamed broadcast content.

In detail, Siemens IT Solutions and Services provided the infrastructure for the SHV Video over IP optical transmission from the City Hall in London via dual paths over the Siemens London Fibre Network to its London Media Gateway at BBC Television Centre in West London. From here, the London Fibre Network feeds the duplicated 1 Gigabit/sec circuits to the Cable&Wireless Point of Presence in Central London from where the signal is carried to the RAI Conference Centre in Amsterdam. Siemens then runs the last 400 metres to the NHK Demonstration Theatre.

At City Hall Siemens also installed fibre optic camera cables and additional optical and copper cables to carry the program audio and all the reverse vision, talkback and data feeds from the top of the building to a temporary control room, also designed and built by Siemens. This Control room contains all the camera control and Video Compression equipment operated by NHK research engineers.

SHV offers unique features, not only in terms of technology. SHV format has four times the horizontal and four times the vertical resolution which means a bit rate 16 times higher than current HDTV. The new technology will be premiered in a number of museums in Japan, and it is said will take another 10 years before this research initiative will impact broadcasting to the home.