TV Anytime Forum........................
eet.com
Group forms spec to 'TV Anytime'
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(08/06/99, 3:23 p.m. EDT)
WASHINGTON - In a bid to expedite the rollout of ?personal television? service to the consuming public, a global group of broadcasters, set-top box vendors and software developers is coming together to standardize methods for describing content in digital-television and Internet data streams.
The loosely organized initiative, which held an informal kickoff meeting here recently as the TV Anywhere Forum, hopes to hammer out draft specifications as soon as next July to help next-generation consumer systems equipped with mass storage automatically find, capture and store the information users want.
With roots in the Digital Audio Visual Council (A HREF="http://www.davic.org/">Davic), the nascent group is developing an opportunities document to pitch its concept to industry. Its basic premise is that with the rapid decline in costs for digital storage, ?local storage would have a profound effect on the way that audiovisual content could be distributed to consumers,? said forum interim chairman Simon Parnall, a project manager for British Broadcasting Corp.'s Research and Development's Multimedia and Networks Group.
The initiative will seek to develop tools and common specifications for content distribution and management. The goal is to allow broadcasters and system vendors to develop applications that leverage the local mass storage inside a TV or set-top.
Targeted technologies include object acquisition, content-description metadata, hooks for developing navigational services and application programming interfaces (APIs) for content management. The TV Anytime specs would cover content delivered via real-time broadcasting and file transfer, by both broadcast and Internet services, and are intended to be open specs that will not be tied to specific architectures or services.
TV Anytime will target a new generation of clients that will ?need to manage the process of content acquisition based on data gleaned from services,? said Parnall. He added that the resident navigator, ?such as the tool used to navigate around the content stored on a set-top box, will be a vital element in future home systems.?
The forum is entering the scene at a time when such companies as Tivo and Replay Networks are kick-starting personal-television services based on proprietary, mutually incompatible specifications. Without standardized approaches for content referencing, APIs and metadata, system vendors would be compelled to develop separate software solutions for each service. Broadcasters may face similar headaches, being forced to tailor content-distribution methods for distinct services.
TV Anytime hopes to head off that scenario. ?Our goal is to achieve consensus [on specs] so that a whole new range of services can be developed and deployed,? Parnall said. ?In any business like this, vertical solutions are first-they must be. But pretty soon, even companies [with proprietary offerings] realize that standards mean more business, a greater range of services available to customers, increased awareness and less hesitation in the marketplace.?
As service operators and systems vendors seek new revenue streams, one approach is to set aside a portion of the TV or set-top's hard-drive real estate for new services and applications. Common specifications for services and clients in that space would enable new applications to reach more people more quickly, say proponents of open specs.
Given the high level of vendor interest and activity in new digital services, Parnall believes a ?fast-track? approach is required to bring such specs about. The forum hopes to hold meetings every two months and to produce a draft standard by July 2000. The opportunities document is expected to be disclosed as early as next month at the International Broadcasters Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam.
Once the standards are set, many in the industry see new opportunities arising for their businesses. ?For us, things like the [forum-targeted] metadata scheme and automated navigational system are a big deal,? said Andy Fischer, director of marketing at MbTV Networks, a division of Metabyte Inc. (Fremont, Calif.) that develops software for interactive-TV products. ?I hope that the TV Anytime standards will quicken the pace of the addition of agent technology to set-top boxes and advanced TVs, and will open up multiple distribution pipes-such as Internet-based content as well as broadcast content-to consumer equipment.?
Fischer said he believes the standards ?are needed to enable horizontal solutions.?
'No members' yet
The forum has yet to formalize a list of participants, but Parnall said that companies that either attended the first meeting or have expressed an interest in the group's activities include Philips, Sony, Pioneer, IBM, BBC, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), NDS, BSkyB, Microsoft, Intel and Tivo.
The group is just now developing a memorandum of understanding for potential members, Parnall said. Until interested companies and individuals formally sign on, ?We really have no members at all, and it would be inappropriate to state that we have any official organization.? But the forum intends to welcome all comers, he added, as long as ?they sign the memorandum of understanding and then turn up at meetings.?
Jim Barton, chief technology officer at Tivo, confirmed that he has been contacted by the TV Anytime Forum for participation. The company hasn't yet decided whether it will participate in the next meeting, he said, but is ?generally supportive of the idea. It is flattering that people are taking the idea of personal television seriously enough to build standards around it.?
The TV Anytime/TV Anywhere concept had been kicking around Davic's Applications Requirements Technical Committee since 1996. Davic, created in 1994, will disband after September, having seen its specifications accepted by the International Standards Organization under ISO/IEC16500. Davic members voted at a June meeting in Poitiers, France, to execute the ?euthanasia clause? built into its statutes. Until the vote took place, TV Anytime/TV Anywhere had been discussed as a subject for Davic 1.5 specifications.
Within Davic, TV Anytime was conceived to deal with temporal shifts for time-shifted viewing of content, while TV Anywhere addressed spatial shifts, describing the real-time stream aspects of content delivery to set-tops using best-effort networks. Parnall, who is also chairman of Davic's Applications Requirements Technical Committee, stressed that the ?execution of the [euthanasia] clause doesn't mean that there was no interest in TV Anytime. Rather, it meant that there was sufficient interest to cause members to believe that a different organization was probably required in order to pursue this important task.?
He said TV Anytime and TV Anywhere fit together and he expects the TV Anytime Forum to tackle TV Anywhere.
TV Anytime's targeted scope of technologies is fairly broad. The group hopes to develop such key technologies as identification schemes, resolution processes, object acquisition, content description metadata and rights management. All are considered necessary for new methods of content distribution and content management.
Metadata specifications, for example, will add content information to aid searching and will enable agent technology. An agent, designed as an autonomous object operating on behalf of a user roaming through the network on one or more servers and services, is expected to enable flexible services both for the user and service provider. The new specifications will establish rules and mechanisms within the network and set-tops, enabling agents to live, work and negotiate with other agents.
Metadata specifications can also allow service operators to add control elements, such as content type, pricing, rights management, segmentation information, embargo and expiration times and dates, storage requirements and cross-references to other objects.
The forum will also pursue mechanisms for building hooks for navigational services. |
