French industry minister Patrick Devedjian officially launched the HD Forum on Thursday (July 8th). At the same time an HDTV channel was launched to provide a signal source for test and demonstration purposes, using a transponder made available free of charge on Eutelsat Hotbird.
The forum intends to push HDTV on all digital transmission media, cable, satellite, ADSL and eventually DTT. Devedjian added that he expected HDTV to rapidly migrate to DTT and be a motor for its takeup.
Some players, notably TF1, have been pushing for the launch of DTT to be delayed and switched to the MPEG4 standard, which enables a greater rate of compression.
Devedjian said that the timetable for the launch of DTT in France (March 2005 for the FTA channels, pay channels six months later) would be maintained. However, he said that he would put forward an amendment to the law of 2000 that limits DTT to the use of MPEG 2, so that MPEG4 may be used if the broadcasters so wish. He also announced that he would ask the general council on technology to draw up a list of propositions before the summer to facilitate the move from MPEG2 to MPEG4.