Standards

Open standards are designed to enable interoperability between equipment and services from a range of manufacturers and service providers. This is opposed to closed environments where the technology is defined and controlled by one main player.

We currently participate, to varying extents, in approximately 20 standards bodies and industry groups internationally as well as a large number of subgroups of these bodies. The outputs of these groups can be formal standards, such as W3C, or profiles and guidelines closer to deployment, such as DTG.

By working in standards groups we gain knowledge from others participating, and by having input from organisations, each with a different focus and interest, the standards are strengthened to become more useful and are more likely to be successfully adopted.

We don't just work on paper proposals - we also do practical work, testing the proposals and specifications.

The work we do on standards continues to be a foundational part of our activity and is often the most important outcome.  A selection of the standards bodies we work with are listed below.

BBC R&D - How we influence international broadcast technology standards