Funferal

DVB in Ireland – input requested

As hinted at back at the start of January, I’m currently working on a response to Comreg’s consultation/proposal on regional DVB in Ireland. Submissions are due by Thursday (specifically 5pm GMT/11am Urbana time), so I hope to get a working draft out in the next day or so. The plan is to produce this under the Scagaire moniker, as with last year’s spectrum management paper. I welcome any suggestions or input individuals may have.
At this point it looks like I’ll be addressing two sets of questions:

• Technical issues around how long licenses should be issued for, and whether Comreg should mandate use of DVB-H (I’m leaning toward skipping questions like ‘should MPEG-4 be required?’ but if anyone wants to weigh in here feel free).
• The selection criteria for those who get control of the multiplexes. Here Comreg are proposing a first come/first served system, with ties to be broken through reference to the following factors:
  1. Speed of Service Introduction
  2. Population Coverage
  3. Geographic Coverage
  4. Service Innovation
  5. Potential to Increase Competition

  Note that bigger is better here (for what is meant to be a regional or local offering) and that the only references to service that they propose to consider are ‘innovation’ and ‘increasing competition’

As usual, I’m going to be concentrating on the need to facilitate non-commercial and participatory media systems. Not withstanding the recent licensing (by BCI) of Ireland’s first non-commercial community-oriented cable TV offerings, I’m probably going to concentrate on the migration of community radio.