While less than 1% of European TV viewers have ever seen the current generation of HDTV, the first live transmission of the next generation standard, Super Hi-Vision, was taking place this morning at the RAI in Amsterdam. Two separate paths were chosen to demonstrate live feeds from Turin and London. Live on camera from the rooftop of London's City Hall was the BBC's Erik Huggers, Director of future media and technology. Erik was fortunate that the rain held off for a change (it has decided to sit on top of Amsterdam most of today instead) but the multiple sound microphones picked up tremendous wind noise. This was more than adequately rendered by the 22.2 speaker system in the NHK Theater at the IBC, so that the audience felt surrounded by swirling winds. A real breeze would have been even nicer as the temperature in the small, packed theater rose steadily over the next hour. Siemens IT Solution and Services compressed the native 24Gbps 7680x4320/60Hz images and 22.2 channel audio to a 600Mbps signal, which was carried via gigabit ethernet fibre connection from London to Amsterdam. Needless to say, the picture quality and sound were stunning, and they were just as effective during the second demonstration of a live satellite transmission from Turin using two full transponders on Eutelsat's Atlantic Bird 3 satellite. In this case the video feed (pre-recorded rather than live) was compressed using MPEG4 encoders to 140Mbps. NHK's Dr Keeichi Kubota, Director General of the Science and Technical Research Laboratories of NHK, was honest enough to admit that initial applications of the SHV system were likely to be found in public and commercial displays. He estimates that the consumer market should begin to emerge in 10 years' time, when displays and content are able to benefit from SHV's capabilities. Critically, he also indicated that the target consumer market would be 70" to 100" displays. Displays of that size are likely to appeal to some US viewers, but I'm not sure many Europeans will see them in their homes, however good the pictures. Visit us at IBC: Web TV and Virtual Worlds Analyst Presentations