The Digital Audio-Visual Council (DAVIC) is a non-profit Association registered in Geneva, Switzerland. The purpose of DAVIC is to favour the success of emerging digital audio-visual applications and services, in the first instance of broadcast and interactive types, by the timely availability of internationally agreed specifications of open interfaces and protocols that maximise interoperability across countries and applications/services.

In less than one year DAVIC has reached a membership of over 150 organisations from 20 countries from all regions of the world and representing virtually all interests in emerging digital audio-visual applications and services.

The current activities in DAVIC are focused on a first set of applications encompassing video distribution, video on demand, teleshopping and other basic interactive services. DAVIC’s workplan is to produce a set of technical specifications of building blocks that users can implement for the purpose of deploying complete end-to-end systems or providing applications and services. These specifications are called DAVIC 1.0.

The specification development process started in October ‘94 with the first DAVIC Call for Proposals (CFP). The CFP was widely distributed to the industry at large and over 60 technical submissions were received in December. The information received from the Call has been consolidated and harmonised into the current draft specifications which is in its second version.

At the meeting in Cagliari, Italy, a number of important agreements have been reached, including preliminary specifications of modulation schemes for Hybrid Fibre Coax, Fibre to the Curb and Active Network Termination.

DAVIC will hold its 9th General Meeting in Melbourne, Australia (95/06/05-09) and plans to produce there the 3rd draft of its specifications. Based on the Melbourne specifications a number of interoperability tests involving different implementations of the specifications will be carried out. The specifications will be frozen and made public for comments from anybody. Because of comments and results of tests, specifications may need to be slightly amended. The final approval of specifications is planned for December ‘95.

The DAVIC Board of Directors is well aware that a wider range of applications can be supported by the progress of digital technologies. A Strategic Planning Advisory Committee has been established for the purpose of producing a draft workplan for the next generations of DAVIC specifications. The definition of the workplan will see the involvement of the DAVIC membership and be finally approved by the Board of Directors in September ‘95.

Future issues of DAVIC specifications will have a sequential numbering such as DAVIC 1.1, DAVIC 1.2 etc. Each new specification will support more functionalities thus allowing the implementation of new applications and services and retain backwards compatibility as far as technically feasible, technologically justified and economically meaningful.

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