The ITU Radiocommunication Assembly considering a) that programme content can be transferred either as a continuous stream or in the form of discontinuous files between different production and storage devices; b) that such data can be transferred through local and wide area networks; c) that all transfers require a number of operations to identify the source and destination of the file or stream; d) that issues of file management, transfer protocols and data interconnection must therefore be considered in television programme production, recording and archiving; e) that common machine control interfaces are required to enable users to switch easily between production and storage devices of different suppliers.