WorldDAB to change its name to WorldDMB?

8th September 2006

The President of WorldDAB, Quentin Howard, who is also the chief executive of the UK national commercial DAB multiplex operator, Digital One, has proposed that WorldDAB should change its name to WorldDMB, and if it is voted through, the name would change at the WorldDAB general assembly in October, to be held in Soeul, South Korea, which is the country that is really responsible for developing DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and bringing it to market, despite early work on DMB being carried out in Germany by Bosch in the mid 1990s.

The name change from WorldDAB — which is responsible for promoting DAB around the world — to WorldDMB, is meant to reflect that the DAB system has moved on from being an audio-only system to being a system that can carry multimedia, in particular the new mobile TV systems DMB (technically DMB should be called T-DMB, because there's a Chinese variant called DMB-T/H, which is actually very different to the T-DMB that uses the DAB transmission system).

I've also noticed that some people are starting to call the 'DAB-IP' system DMB-IP instead, which is a far more sensible name for the system, because it is almost identical to DMB, and it was primarily developed for mobile TV use.

Personally, I wonder whether the proposal to change the name to WorldDMB might have something to do with the fact that the DAB system is in the process of being upgraded, and whether they will call the upgraded system DMB (the upgraded version of DAB will be almost identical to DMB anyway). Both German and French radio broadcasters are calling to use DMB for radio instead of DAB, so changing the name to the WorldDMB forum might effectively be the start of a wholescale change from DAB to DMB, with both radio and mobile TV being carried on DMB.