The head of Aeranti-Corallo, Marco Rossignoli, has criticized the state of Italian local television broadcasting infrastructure. He argues that outdated transmission centers are significantly hindering the sector's ability to deliver high-quality programming.
Drawing a parallel with the recent Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Rossignoli highlighted the contrast between advancements in global television technology and the persistent use of obsolete standards in Italy. He noted that while the global market showcases increasingly sophisticated high-performance television screens optimized for modern encoding technologies, Italian local broadcasters remain constrained by older, less capable systems.
“This situation determines an unjustified limitation of the quality of the service offered to citizens by local TV”, Rossignoli stated. He further emphasized the disparity between national and local broadcasters, noting that, “While national television broadcasters have been assigned adequate transmission capacity, even continuing to use the old DVB-T standard (with MPEG-4 compression instead of MPEG-2), local televisions are forced to transmit with a significantly lower quality, pending the completion of the transition to DVB-T2/HEVC”.
Rossignoli contends that this technological lag not only undermines the competitiveness of local television but also negatively impacts the diversity of information available to the public and limits access to local content. He urged the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy (MIMIT) to establish a clear timeline for the transition to DVB-T2/HEVC, accompanied by concrete support measures to aid broadcasters in upgrading their infrastructure.