From rabbit ears to Wi-Fi, the technologies that bring television into our homes are central to the company’s story

By Patrizia La Rosa

I was eight years old when my grandmother gave me my first TV set. It may have been just a small black-and-white set, but it was all mine. I still remember the thrill of that moment: for the first time, I could choose what to watch without asking anybody’s permission.

Seizing that small measure of independence required patience. The channels only revealed themselves after a struggle with the small tuning stick used to hunt for frequencies. I would turn it, adjust it and turn it back.

Then there was the antenna – thin and incredibly temperamental. A millimetre move in any direction could make a crystal-clear image dissolve into ‘snow’. I remember finding the right spot and then standing perfectly still, almost holding my breath. At that moment, everything else disappeared; but it only took someone walking across the room with a heavy step for the spell to break.

The author’s first TV set

Compared to my father, who used to have to climb onto the roof to fix the main antenna, I was lucky: my battle was fought entirely inside the room. This was a world away from how his generation had experienced television.

My father often told me how, back in the 1950s, TV was an event as much as it was an object. People would gather in the homes of the few neighbours who owned one, huddling close to each other in silence, the light from the screen filling the room. Back then, the television was neither thin nor discreet: it had a body and a presence, occupying centre stage wherever it was. Inside lived the cathode-ray tube, slowly awakening behind the curved screen as if coming to life.

In just a few decades, we moved from a single set shared by an entire neighbourhood to TVs and monitors in every room, and now to screens in everyone’s pockets. What was once a collective experience has been transformed into something personal as devices accompany us everywhere, turn on in an instant and adapt to our rhythms. ‘The’ television no longer exists; instead there are a thousand windows open to the world, always within reach.

This steady advance has been made possible by a wide range of technological breakthroughs in different fields; and since 1982, few technology platforms have been more central to the Sisvel story as the television. After all, this is where it all began for founder Roberto Dini.

The inventors

In the 1970s, television coverage was far from universal. In Italy and elsewhere, households in rural areas often struggled to get a clear picture. Some viewers installed private TV boosters or repeaters – products that promised to improve reception. But these inexpensive devices did not cleanly amplify the signals. In practice, they compressed the amplitude of the television signal, introducing a new form of distortion.

This problem was addressed by an Italian patent filed in 1976. The named inventor was Roberto Dini, an engineer working for Italian TV manufacturer Indesit. His solution was a signal processing circuit which detected the distortion and generated a correcting signal. It was to be the first of more than 30 patent families naming Dini as inventor or co-inventor.

This innovation and many others in the television field emerged from Indesit’s Laboratory of Advanced Design & Research. Founded in 1972 by Attilio Farina, the lab produced around 200 patented inventions, mostly related to the groundbreaking use of microprocessors in TV sets. It was a research division of Indesit’s TV production department, which included a patent function which Farina had established with Dini’s assistance. They set up shop at the Indesit production plant 10 kilometres outside of Turin, in None. Another key figure on the team was Pietro Belisomi, a co-inventor on many patents with Farina and Dini and later a Sisvel consultant.

Belisomi, Farina and Dini

A licensing alliance for the TV industry

Sisvel was founded by Roberto Dini following an initiative of the Italian Ministry of Industry, which, through R.EL (Ristrutturazione ELettronica), created a consortium of several Italian electronics manufacturers, such as Zanussi, Indesit, and Brionvega. Its original goal was to help reorganise a national television industry facing significant challenges and strong foreign competition.

However, after the attempt to build a single production hub failed, it was in the field of patent licensing that Sisvel found its true purpose.

The alliance had grown from its original three members to include all the other Italian television manufacturers: Seleco, Imperial, Mivar, Ultravox, Europhon, Elcit, Industrie Formenti and Sei-Sinudyne.

One core challenges that they had to contend with was incoming royalty demands from global patent owners. Among the most significant were AEG Telefunken, which held patents on the PAL colour television system; RCA, which had invented the colour cathode ray tube; and IGR, a German consortium with a portfolio covering stereophonic audio for analogue television sets.

Sisvel was established in 1982 to reorganise Italy’s television industry

Sisvel provided its members with the necessary negotiation strategies and legal tools to defend against these claims – a competency that was lacking in the industry at the time. It also obtained a key portfolio of patents from Indesit to deploy to secure better licensing terms. These patents could be leveraged not just against the established licensors, but also against new competitors from East Asia – most notably a trio of South Korean TV makers: Samsung, Daewoo and LG. It was a business model that was not only without precedent in Italy but revolutionary on the world stage.

The analogue era

Some of Sisvel’s earliest and most enduring successes in the licensing field emerged from the patent portfolio that it acquired from Indesit. This included inventions that shaped the TV watching experience in the 1980s and throughout the analogue era. Three innovations stand out in particular.

On-screen display (OSD)

One key Indesit patent enabled the display of TV controls on the screen. When sets were controlled by dials and switches, little information appeared on-screen. With the advent of remote control, however, it became necessary to display information about volume, contrast and brightness settings, along with channel numbers. Simple graphics overlaid on the TV image, enabled by microprocessors within the set, were a practical and inexpensive solution.

99 channel television

Frequency synthesis tuning was another important Indesit invention. As broadcast channels proliferated, tuning became a challenge – especially in dense environments with lots of interference. The high cost of electronic memory also made it difficult to store a large number of stations. Indesit’s precise and patented method of tuning a receiver overcame these constraints and was eventually adopted industry-wide.

Innovations in Teletext

Developed by the BBC and brought to Italy by RAI, Teletext (known as Televideo in Italy) was a vital precursor to the Internet, displaying pages of live-updated text that brought news stories, weather reports, programme guides, train schedules and a range of other information into viewers’ homes. Sisvel made essential contributions to how Teletext was used in practice, including how viewers navigated its pages using their remote controls.

Sisvel made key contributions to Teletext, known in Italy as Televideo

As Sisvel evolved and began to focus its business on licensing its own patents and those owned by third parties, analogue television technologies were the basis of some successful early programmes. These technologies were crucial milestones on the road to the smart TVs of today:

• The TOP Teletext programme was built around the table of pages system refined by IRT, a research consortium established by German broadcasters. It improved on standard Teletext by letting users jump directly to a desired page and skip blank pages.

• A Sisvel invention patented in 1990 paved the way for the ATSS (Automatic Tuning and Sorting System) licensing programme. Farina and Dini capitalised on their longstanding track record of tuning-related innovation to develop a system for automatically organising channels during device set-up. This replaced an unwieldy manual process and became a de facto industry standard.

• In 1997, Sisvel obtained an exclusive licence from IRT to license its Wide-screen signalling (WSS) patent portfolio. This allowed television receivers to detect the aspect ratio of an incoming video and automatically display it in the correct format – it played a key role in the transition from 4:3 to 16:9 as widescreen television took hold.

The digital revolution – MPEG Audio

In the 2000s, digital terrestrial broadcasts started to be switched on and analogue signals switched off. Struggles with the tuner and battles with rabbit ears and aerials would soon be a thing of the past. Viewers gained access to many more channels, better picture quality and more interactive services such as electronic programme guides. Airwaves were freed up to host the growing volume of mobile phone traffic.

With the advent of digital television, the technologies at the heart of home and personal entertainment changed radically.

In the audio field, old analogue systems were replaced by digital audio. Digital audio encoding and decoding was achieved using a technology standardized by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), specifically the MPEG Audio standard. The holders of the standard essential patents (SEPs) on this technology (Philips, France Telecom, Telediffusion de France, and IRT) granted Sisvel the exclusive right to sublicense.

This was the beginning of one of Sisvel's greatest successes in the licensing business. This standardised technology, in the form of MPEG Audio Layer II, was first applied to all digital television receivers. Then, in the advanced form of MP3, it was applied to all audio music players (MP3 players), and finally to all mobile phones, computers and tablets. Thus, the number of products that could be licensed annually, starting from a few million, rose to several billion.

This MPEG Audio licensing programme was a real commercial success and greatly aided Sisvel’s licensing capabilities, not least because of the approach taken to unwilling licensees: the firm instigated international litigation against a number of major companies and also pioneered the active use of customs seizures to prevent infringing products entering European markets.

The digital revolution – DVB

In Europe, the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) family of technologies – with DVB-T as the core transmission standard – was central to this transition. Patent pools around these standards were originally administered by MPEG-LA. The DVB-T pool was transferred to Sisvel in 2008, the same year that the analogue TV switch-off commenced in Italy. Sisvel leveraged its expertise and relationships in the world of television to make the programme a success.

Sisvel became administrator of the DVB-T patent pool in 2008

But it was not long before 5G was on the horizon and mobile networks’ voracious appetite for frequencies necessitated a shift to an even more advanced broadcast standard using even less spectrum. DVB-T2 delivered advances in a number of other areas too, including Ultra HD/4K resolution, increasingly immersive audio and far superior signal stability.

The licensing programme for DVB-T2 was a landmark success for Sisvel and the patent pool model in general. Launched in 2010, it initially struggled as adoption of the new standard lagged and the market gave a tepid response to the pool terms. Following a strategic overhaul, a more balanced pool emerged and eventually expanded to include all patents declared essential to the DVB-T2 standard – more than 2,100 in total. It went on to secure licensing deals with well over 200 technology users including all of the most significant device manufacturers. It was a rare pool programme that was able to serve as a true one-stop-shop and license virtually all implementation of the technology.

Beyond the antenna: video codecs and Wi-Fi

As internet speeds have ramped up – both in the home and on mobile networks – the barriers between television sets and other screens have increasingly broken down. Video, including live broadcast, is consumed on mobile phones, tablets and computer monitors; the ability to receive terrestrial TV signals is less and less of a differentiator for conventional TVs. Where it is still the centrepiece of a room, the television’s role is increasingly that of a display: a hub for apps, set-top boxes and streaming services that deliver content over the internet using the latest compression technologies.

Streaming high-resolution video (eg, 4K) involves compressing massive amounts of data so that it can travel smoothly. Sisvel has been at the forefront of this coding revolution; and codecs are a significant strength of the Sisvel Tech team based in None, just outside Turin.

As one of the most widely adopted video coding formats for web-based and streaming video (powering platforms such as YouTube), VP9 represented a massive leap in compression efficiency. Sisvel established a dedicated patent pool to provide a licensing solution for VP9, helping to bring order and clarity to the market.

Building on that success, the industry shifted towards AV1, an even more efficient open codec. Through its AV1 licensing programme, Sisvel continues to offer device manufacturers and service providers a transparent, one-stop licensing platform, accelerating the global adoption of ultra-high-definition streaming. As the market anticipates the introduction of the next-generation AV2 specification, Sisvel is actively studying the technologies involved and engaging with the owners of potentially essential patents.

Wi-Fi and codecs are central to today’s TV experience

Increasingly, however, it is Wi-Fi that now sits at the heart of all home entertainment. A young person trying to enjoy a favourite programme today is no longer worried about ‘snow’, but rather buffering. Playing with the rabbit ears has given way to resetting the router.

Sisvel has set the standard for Wi-Fi licensing programmes, creating successful pools in a space long considered too complex and opaque for efficient aggregated licensing. The company’s Wi-Fi 6 programme attracted 40 licensees before being succeeded by the 10-member Wi-Fi Multimode pool, which offers access to both Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 standard essential patents.

The Wi-Fi Multimode programme has the flexibility to address all of the different ways in which we consume content today, offering the same FRAND rates for devices spanning mobile phones, tablets, laptops, in-dash products and – yes – television sets.

New technologies, same mission

While television may have changed radically in its formats and delivery methods, one constant remains: the need for a healthy ecosystem that is capable of nurturing innovation. From the outset, Sisvel’s mission has been to empower the people who make this evolution possible. We have never lost sight of that – in part because our founder was one of those people, working with colleagues to bring about these remarkable advances.

It can be fun and useful to recall all of the cutting-edge technologies that have made an impact on our lives and on our careers. To power innovation, though, you always need to be thinking about what comes next. That mindset has allowed Sisvel to anticipate and facilitate many of the big shifts in how we consume media. We will continue to do so.

Patrizia La Rosa is DVB-T2 Programme Manager at Sisvel