BBC World in financial strain

BBC World Service could face major budget cuts that would force its withdrawal from Burma and several other countries, notes Digital Spy.

The Foreign Office, which funds the World Service via an annual £272 million grant, has informed executives to prepare for budget cuts of 25% by April 2011.

According to a diplomatic source, the BBC's broadcast service in Myanmar, Burma, is among several services under threat from the cutbacks.

The Japanese communications ministry has sided with DoCoMo-led ISDB-Tmm proposal, over MediaFLO, for next generation multimedia broadcast platform to start in 2012, states WirelessWatch.

The company is to build infrastructure for mobile devices such as movies, e-books, games, music and live news reports, to cellphones, tablet computers and other handheld devices.

The selection of the DoCoMo-led group, which uses domestic standards, over a rival group using US standards was revealed by the ministry's Radio Regulatory Council.

Programmable logic vendor Xilinx revealed a new development platform intended to help engineers meet the rapidly expanding demand for 3D TV broadcast capability and other high definition video applications, writes EETimes.

According to Ben Runyan, senior manager for broadcast communications at Xilinx, broadcast equipment manufacturers are increasingly choosing field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) over application-specific integrated circuits and application specific standard products.

He says this is primarily because FPGAs provide the flexibility to enable designers to comply with rapidly emerging standards for video acquisition, contribution across the broadcast infrastructure, distribution to the home and consumers' 3D and 4Kx2K displays.