What They Say
The IRT (Institut für Rundfunktechnik) in Munich is in the process of liquidation and has closed more of its activities after a decision to close in the summer of 2020. The IRT was founded in 1956 to perform R&D for the German-speaking (DACH) region and had around 100 staff at the end of last year when it started the process.
The IRT has been a leading centre for research into broadcasting using 5G.
What We Think
I’m not sure how I missed this news last year, which I heard about when the PR department of the Institute contacted me to say ‘Goodbye’. A decision was made at the end of July 2020 to close the institute after concluding that it was “not possible to develop a reliable economic perspective for the future”. ZDF was the first to cancel its membership in December 2019, citing concerns about lost royalties from patent rights and also saying that broadcast-specific knowledge is getting less important. Others cancelled in response to avoid escalation in their own contributions.
I met with staff from the IRT quite a few times over the years and once gave a talk to an EBU Technical Committee at the site. It was at the beginning of the switch from CRT to LCD about formats. When I explained that LCDs would be 1366 x 768, rather than 720 lines, they were outraged that the display industry was driven by economics and marketing, rather than image quality as the scaling needed to go from 720P signals to 768 would inevitably reduce the image quality. (BR)
IRT has done work on colour volumes and I plan a follow up article on this topic.
