Aldo Cugnini

Aldo Cugnini is well known in the digital television industry, and has held various technical and management positions at Philips Electronics, CBS Technology Center, and other technology companies. His achievements include six patents in the fields of broadcasting and consumer electronics, with four more patents currently pending. He had a leadership role in the development of the ATSC Digital Television System now deployed in the United States, for which Philips shared an Engineering Emmy Award.

Articles by Aldo Cugnini

Interactive video a potential new revenue stream

Interactive video as a revenue-generating opportunity still eludes broadcasters, in some part because of limits of the existing broadcast standards. This is about to change, with the advent of various new technologies that will add interactivity in a backwards-compatible fashion.

The cloud for broadcast: more content for consumers

With VOD services, the content is stored on large servers located at remote sites, and the media are streamed to large numbers of independent and perhaps simultaneous (but asynchronous) users. Thus, as more and more devices — particularly handhelds and mobiles — consume multimedia content via streaming (as opposed to traditional “broadcast”) services, content and software capabilities are moving toward off-site remote storage systems.

New expectations set for mobile video service

Last year, the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) released a specification, the ATSC Mobile DTV Receiver Profile Guidelines. The spec, issued by the OMVC Technical Advisory Group (OTAG), recommends two profiles for mobile receivers: a required Base Profile and an optional Enhanced Profile. (Let’s call it an “E-Profile”). So consumers can sort it all out, it’s conceivable that support for the Enhanced Profile could lead to a class of devices with a user-recognizable label.

Next-generation broadcast: more bandwidth for the future

The development of new broadcast technologies that offer higher efficiencies and/or performance is an ongoing quest, with researchers continuing to push on methods to achieve a higher data throughput. The result is that the hardware and software providing media delivery will continue to evolve. On the broadcast side, modulation and compression are key components of a next-generation broadcast system.

3-D broadcast production is struggling on its way.

Although the jury is still out on whether 3-D entertainment delivery has reached a mainstream threshold, there is no doubt that the implementation of electronic distribution of 3-D content — in a form that is compatible with today’s digital transmission systems — is a requirement for keeping all business paths viable. Several initiatives are now under way that are together forming a new 3-D ecosystem.

A new, more efficient standard for MPEG systems

HEVC adds new features to the MPEG toolkit. The standard incorporates numerous improvements over AVC, including a new prediction block structure, and updates to the toolkit that include intra-prediction, inverse transforms, motion compensation, loop filtering and entropy coding. A major difference from MPEG-2 and AVC is a new framework encompassing coding units (CUs), prediction units (PUs) and transform units (TUs).

The emergence of new multiplexing technologies

Having previously discussed aspects of multiplexing in this column, this month we’ll consider the technology in broader terms. In general, multiplexing is the process of transmitting multiple signals within a common channel, with the purpose of using a shared medium. On the receiving end, a demultiplexer (demux) extracts the individual signals that were originally combined in a
multiplexer (mux).

Digital video, audio interfaces 1

Professional video interfaces are undergoing a change, in part due to the age of the initial digital systems, and also because of the emergence of high-performance interconnects for consumer use. First, let’s summarize the existing solutions for high-bandwidth audio/video transfer.

Existing interfaces

A tutorial on modulation technologies, from ASTC, OFDM, QAM to DVB

The distribution of content involves the need to adapt digital information to its means of carriage — what we typically call transmission — and to understand that fully, we need to understand the process of digital modulation.

Monitors and displays

It was not too long ago when we were considering whether flat panels would overtake the venerable CRT in utility and function for professional applications. Believe it or not, that day has already passed. This month, we’ll summarize the state of the art for professional monitors and displays, and take a deeper look at some of their characteristics.

Internet TV systems and coding

Today's TV viewers want more content from an increasing number of sources, and that means that Internet delivery is a growing phenomenon. With hybrid technologies emerging, it is reasonable to expect that television broadcast will increasingly use the Internet to expand throughput beyond that afforded by a single RF channel. But there are limitations to the Internet that must be understood in order to capitalize on this commodity, and some of those constraints are being overcome by new technologies.

Wireless video

With wireless technologies moving more content to viewers, live television broadcast must adapt to consumers' lifestyles, and while an OTA connection

Interactive TV

Consumers are increasingly staying connected to their content world through fixed and mobile devices. This connectivity requires a level of interactivity

Elements of DRM

Digital rights management (DRM) has come to mean the combination of content protection (by means of encryption) with entitlement rules (conditional access,