News Broadcasting
Digital broadcasting set to transform communication landscape by 2015: RRC-06
MUMBAI: The conclusion of ITU’s Regional Radiocommunication Conference (RRC-06) in Geneva saw the signing of a treaty agreement that is a major step in implementing World Summit on the Information Society objectives. The digitalization of broadcasting in Europe, Africa, Middle East and the Islamic Republic of Iran by 2015 represents a major landmark towards establishing a more equitable, just and people-centred Information Society.
The agreement will herald the development of ‘all-digital’ terrestrial broadcast services for sound and television. The digital switchover will leapfrog existing technologies to connect the unconnected in underserved and remote communities and close the digital divide.
“The most important achievement of the Conference,” remarked ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi, “is that the new digital Plan provides not only new possibilities for structured development of digital terrestrial broadcasting but also sufficient flexibilities for adaptation to the changing telecommunication environment.”
The Regional Radiocommunication Conference was chaired and brought to a conclusion by Kavouss Arasteh of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The agreement reached at RRC-06 paves the way for utilizing the full potential of information and communication technologies to achieve the internationally recognized development goals. The date of transition to digital terrestrial broadcasting in the year 2015 is intended to coincide with the targets set by the Millennium Development Goals.
The regional agreement for digital services has been reached in the frequency bands 174 – 230 MHz and 470 – 862 MHz. It marks the beginning of the end of analogue broadcasting.
The Conference agreed that the transition period from analogue to digital broadcasting, which begins at 0001 UTC 17 June 2006, should end on 17 June 2015, but some countries preferred an additional five-year extension for the VHF band (174-230 MHz).
The digital dividend
The switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting will create new distribution networks and expand the potential for wireless innovation and services. The digital dividend accruing from efficiencies in spectrum usage will allow more channels to be carried across fewer airwaves and lead to greater convergence of services.
The inherent flexibility offered by digital terrestrial broadcasting will support mobile reception of video, internet and multimedia data, making applications, services and information accessible and usable anywhere and at any time. It opens the door to new innovations such as Handheld TV Broadcast (DVB-H) along with High-Definition Television (HDTV) while providing greater bandwidth to existing mobile, fixed and radionavigation services. Services ancillary to broadcasting (wireless microphones, talk back links) are also planned on a national basis and need to be extended.
The World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07), which will meet in the autumn of 2007, will deal with the regulatory aspects of the usage of the spectrum for these services.
Terrestrial digital broadcasting carries many advantages over the analogue system:
Expanded services
Higher quality video and audio
Greater variety and faster rates of data transmission
Consistency of data flows over long distances
More spectrum efficiency means more channels
This agreement, which paves the way for a new paradigm of wireless digital communication technologies, is expected to be extrapolated by other regions and countries and influence a global shift away from the analogue system that has been in place for the past 45 years.
During the five weeks of deliberations which began on 15 May, RRC-06 took decisions to allow iteration of the complex software tools used by the ITU secretariat as a basis to generate the draft plan that will facilitate the coordinated and timely introduction of digital broadcasting. The Plan assures that an outstanding 70’500 digital broadcasting requirements, including stations, will become a reality within the planned area. It succeeded in creating a level playing field as a new basis for competition.
The first session of this Conference (RRC-04) took place in May 2004 and established a solid, comprehensive and technical basis for the agreement, including the framework for the intersessional studies. It has already resulted in the accelerated introduction of digital terrestrial broadcasting in many countries. “Digital technologies are now transmitting high-resolution images of the Soccer World Cup from Germany to fans around the world who are watching the matches with excitement,” said Utsumi. “Digital terrestrial broadcasting is now a reality with a bright future.”
A complex process
Conference chairman Arasteh said that RRC-06 was a technically complex process comprising voluminous computational calculations and data processing tasks, electronic document handling and the use of five working languages. He added that ITU, although facing these challenges for the first time, could provide the Conference with adequate technical and regulatory expertise and support for the full satisfaction of the participating delegations.
More than 1000 delegates representing 104 countries met in Geneva to adopt the treaty agreement that will replace the analogue broadcasting plans existing since 1961 for Europe and since 1989 for Africa. The new digital Plan, based on broadcasting standards known as T-DAB (for sound) and DVB-T (for TV), covers a wide area of the world including Europe, countries of the CIS, Africa, Middle East and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A major challenge faced by the conference was to find ways for digital and analogue broadcasting to co-exist on the radio-frequency spectrum during the transition period without causing interference.
Cooperation with EBU and CERN
A key ingredient for the success of the Conference was the unprecedented level of cooperation between ITU, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
The complex planning activities conducted at this conference and during the intersessional period were based on the software developed by EBU, which includes hundreds of thousands of programme lines. In preparing the Plan for digital terrestrial broadcasting, ITU experts performed meticulous calculations within a limited timeframe using two independent infrastructures: the ITU distributed system with 100 PCs and the CERN Grid infrastructure that is based on a few hundred dedicated CPUs from several European institutions.
News Broadcasting
Newsrooms rethink AI, trust and revenue models
Editors and tech leaders debate tools, deepfakes and viability.
MUMBAI: If yesterday’s newsroom ran on caffeine and chaos, tomorrow’s may well run on code but with a human still holding the pen. At the 22nd edition of the Video Broadcast and Broadband Tech Summit hosted by IndianTelevision.com, some of the sharpest minds in Indian media gathered to examine how artificial intelligence, automation and shifting audience behaviour are reshaping journalism. The session, titled The Newsroom of Tomorrow Tools, Trust, and Business Viability In Focus, did not descend into techno-utopian hype. Instead, it wrestled with a more uncomfortable question: how do you stay relevant, credible and profitable when the audience is changing faster than the headline cycle?
The panel featured Govindraj Ethiraj, Editor of The Core, Dr Nilesh Khare, COO of Sakal Media Group; Prakaran Tiwari, Chief Executive Producer at NDTV Profit; Manoj Padmanabhan, Head of Business Media and Entertainment at AWS; Neeraj Mishra, Key Account Manager at Vizrt and session chair; and Mayuresh Konnur, Bilingual Correspondent at Collective Newsroom, publisher for BBC in India.
Govindraj Ethiraj set the tone with a frank assessment. “The reason people do not consume as much news through us is because they are consuming news through other sources they trust more,” he said. In a fragmented ecosystem flooded with content, trust has become the real differentiator.
Yet AI is undeniably transforming workflows. Ethiraj admitted he now uses AI tools to proofread his own articles. “Sometimes it is scary how much it picks, but it helps,” he said. What once required layers of sub-editing can now be assisted by machines trained to flag errors, inconsistencies and structural weaknesses.
He pointed to how newsroom roles have evolved. The desk editor, widely advertised over the last 15 years, barely existed in its current form before the internet boom. As digital publishing accelerated, tasks such as curating listicles, ranking stories and optimising headlines became specialised functions. Now, many of those responsibilities can be performed or at least supported by AI systems. The disruption is not hypothetical; it is operational.
Dr Nilesh Khare approached the issue from both a business and technological standpoint. Sakal Media Group is developing its own large language model, built on 60 years of text and photo archives. The goal is independence. “We won’t need to depend on other platforms to develop ours,” he said, underscoring the strategic value of proprietary data.
For Khare, AI represents opportunity as much as anxiety. It can help expand content across geographies and languages, particularly in bridging North and South Indian markets. It can streamline production and reduce costs. He did not shy away from the implications. “As a journalist I feel bad but as a content producer I feel good that we will require less manpower,” he said, articulating a tension many in the room recognised but few openly admit.
He also highlighted how audience behaviour is evolving. Today, a retail investor can follow a stock using Gemini or GPT instead of toggling between multiple news channels. News is no longer consumed linearly; it is queried, personalised and synthesised. The newsroom must therefore produce content that survives not just on screens but within AI-generated summaries.
Prakaran Tiwari offered a more philosophical reflection. “AI has developed itself and adapted on the basis of how news is consumed. It’s all about giving a perspective,” he said. In his view, the competitive edge will not lie in speed alone but in interpretation. Facts are increasingly commoditised; context is not.
He also suggested that formats are fluid. While short-form video dominates social feeds, long-form audio is resurging. Govindraj Ethiraj noted that in the United States the 2024 election was described as the “podcast election”, reflecting how audiences are investing time in deeper, long-form discussions. The newsroom of tomorrow must cater to both scrolling and sustained listening.
Manoj Padmanabhan of AWS reframed the debate. Technology, he argued, is not an existential threat but an amplifier. “The power is given to the human journalist with all this technology in their hand, with it acting as a support or assistant to deliver the correct and relevant news to the people,” he said.
The traditional divide between a “normal” newsroom and a “digital” newsroom is fading. “It will not be two newsrooms,” he said. “It will be one newsroom.” In that integrated environment, the storyteller remains central. AI may assist with research, editing and distribution, but editorial judgement remains human.
Neeraj Mishra of Vizrt echoed the assistive narrative. India, he said, is a market of organised chaos, where news broadcasters are pushing ever-increasing volumes of content. AI will help manage scale. It is not here to replace people but to assist them.
Production barriers are already collapsing. “You don’t need a green screen to produce content now,” Mishra observed, hinting at virtual production tools and real-time rendering technologies. And this, he said, is only the beginning. In a cost-conscious market like India, AI adoption in both B to B and B to C segments is likely to rise sharply. The skills are available, he argued, the real question is whether organisations are willing to invest.
If opportunity was one half of the conversation, risk was the other. Mayuresh Konnur warned that fake news is now being peddled with alarming ease using AI tools. Deepfakes, synthetic audio and fabricated visuals can damage credibility overnight. Several journalists, he said, have already faced instances where manipulated content was circulated in their name.
“Eventually it becomes a question of how authentic you are in the market,” Konnur noted. In a crowded information economy, credibility is the ultimate moat. Regulations and clear guidelines, he argued, are necessary to curb misuse without stifling innovation.
Mishra added a note of caution against overuse. “AI should not be everywhere. It has to be used optimally,” he said. The value lies not in blanket automation but in strategic integration.
One of the most resonant metaphors came from Padmanabhan. AI, he suggested, is like a brush in a human hand. Powerful, versatile, transformative but inert without the artist. It cannot survive without the human touch.
Konnur distilled the session’s core takeaway, AI is inevitable, but the art of storytelling will never disappear.
In a media landscape defined by speed, shrinking attention spans and intense competition, the newsroom of tomorrow is not simply a technological upgrade. It is a recalibration. Between efficiency and ethics. Between automation and authenticity. Between reducing manpower and retaining meaning.
The algorithms may write cleaner copy and generate sharper graphics. They may even predict what audiences want before audiences know it themselves. But the enduring task remains unchanged to tell stories that inform, interrogate and inspire.
And for that, the human newsroom is still very much open for business.
