The Government is seeking views on the proposed measures outlined in its Media Reform Green Paper, which include:
- offering commercial broadcasters a one time, irrevocable choice to operate under a new commercial television broadcasting licence, with a reduced regulatory burden, provided they agree to move at a future point to using substantially less radiofrequency spectrum
Includes discussion of broadcast technology
The key change under this scenario would be a modest consolidation in the infrastructure used to provide
commercial television broadcasting services. Specifically, commercial television services in each licence
area would be provided via two (rather than the current three) multiplexes, using the DVB-T standard and
the MPEG-4 video compression format.
Terrestrial broadcasting
The adoption of a new broadcasting standard for free-to-air television would be highly complex in terms of
design, implementation and operation, and would require significant investment in new transmission
infrastructure. It would also require all Australian households to have DVB-T2-capable reception equipment
(televisions or other connected TV devices) if they wished to receive and watch broadcast services.
Under this scenario, and for the purposes of this paper, it is assumed that free-to-air television services would
be provided on four DVB-T2 multiplexes in all markets, using either the MPEG-4 or HEVC compression format.
• A DVB-T2 multiplex operating on a 7 MHz channel operates with a gross data rate of approximately
32 Mbps, compared with 23 Mbps for a DVB-T multiplex, for a given level of coverage. All things being
equal, a DVB-T2 multiplex can carry approximately 40% more content than a DVB-T multiplex.
• DVB-T2 transmissions also use more advanced compression formats, including HEVC. Content compressed
using the HEVC format uses around 25% of the bandwidth that would be required to broadcast the same
content with similar video quality using the MPEG-2 standard, and around 50% of the bandwidth
compared with MPEG-4.
