The Digital Audio-Visual Council(DAVIC) held its 13th meeting in New York, NY from the 17th to the 21st of June, hosted by Columbia University. About 300 experts in the field of multimedia gathered together from all over the world. These experts from more than 200 companies and organizations represent most of the major players in this field.

The goal of DAVIC is to promote broadband digital services using a variety of delivery media such as optical fiber, cable or satellite, by ensuring compatibility and interoperability on a world-wide basis. This will be advantageous to all parties - equipment manufacturers, network operators, content producers, service providers and most importantly consumers.

A DAVIC "interoperability event" was held in parallel with the regular DAVIC meeting, hosted by the Image Technology for New Media (ITNM) Center at Columbia University. It was the first multi-national DAVIC interoperability event organized, and had the goal of testing and verifying the interfaces and protocols specified in the DAVIC 1.0 specifications released in December 1995. A total of eight companies from around the world participated in the event, interconnecting components (video servers, set-top boxes and applications) of different DAVIC-compliant video on demand systems with each other, using Columbia University’s ATM network. The participating companies and institutions were: Columbia University (USA), CSELT (Italy), DeTe Berkom (Germany), GCL (Japan), GTE Laboratories (USA), Hewlett Packard IDACOM (Canada), and NTT (Japan).

Jules A. Bellisio, the president of DAVIC said, "The interoperability event carried out in conjunction with this meeting demonstrates that the DAVIC specification can successfully provide assured and immediate access to broadcast quality video and other multimedia services anywhere around the globe. Such capabilities have been a dream of many Internet users. DAVIC is now working on the convergence of the DAVIC specifications with Internet in order to turn this dream into reality."

During this meeting DAVIC members have incorporated members’ comments to a major extension of the specifications contained in DAVIC 1.1. These specifications add new functions, tools, and technologies such as:

Basic Internet access,

Virtual machine to support downloaded software, and

Microwave broadcast services (MMDS, LMDS).

They have also created and issued baseline DAVIC 1.2 specifications for public comment. The specifications which will be published at the end of this year incorporate the latest developments in multimedia technologies such as:

By using these specifications, industry can develop multimedia systems which are capable of seamless handling of numerous high quality, digital audio-visual services as well as current and emerging Internet services.

DAVIC will conduct its next meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in September this year, where the DAVIC 1.1 specification will be released and DAVIC 1.2 specifications will be finalized.

DAVIC will continue its effort developing state of the art specifications to meet the requirements of a fast-growing multimedia industry to provide mutually agreed inter-operable systems.

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