News Bulletin

DAVIC shows its innovating power by publishing the world’s first high-level IP specifications
The Digital Audio-Visual Council (DAVIC), began this last year of the century successfully by releasing the first in a series of IP based specifications. This revolutionary step towards a complete DAVIC Intranet was the result of joint efforts of its members before and during the 23^rd DAVIC meeting, in Portland Oregon, 18-22 January 1999.

Unique
DAVIC is a global standardisation body which specifies open end-to-end systems for interactive multimedia services. Its 157 organisation members represent the relevant industry players: content providers, service providers, broadcasters, telcos, consumer electronic manufacturers, computer manufacturers and IP-companies. Jointly they address all layers of the service chain, from physical modulation schemes to programming interfaces for standardised applications. This broad co-operation is unique and ensures a world-wide basis for agreed specifications.

DAVIC has already released the world’s first specifications for broadband interactive audio-visual services and digital broadcasting. The broadcasting industry has implemented these specifications successfully, resulting in the availability of DAVIC compliant settop-boxes on the market today, and the start of operational DAVIC compliant digital broadcast services.

The DAVIC Intranet
The key focus areas of the agreed DAVIC 1.5 specifications are TV Anywhere/TV Anytime systems. TV Anywhere means that we can e.g. watch our favourite television programs even when we are travelling on the other side of the world. With a TV Anytime system we can store a program on our available storage media and watch it when it suits us best. Even programs which are broadcast days or a week later, can be stored in this way. Another example of TV Anytime is the possibility to pause a program we are watching in real-time, e.g. to put the kids to bed, and then resume as soon as they have fallen asleep.

These are only examples which show how DAVIC’s current IP-direction will open up new horizons for both industry and consumers throughout the world in the near future.

In the coming months the specifications will be completed and refined. This will occur at the next DAVIC meeting - in April in Hamamatsu, Japan. At the June meeting in Poitiers-Futuroscope, France, DAVIC will approve the TV Anytime/Anywhere work by issuing the DAVIC 1.5 specifications on CD-ROM.

Applications
A major achievement of the Portland meeting was the finalisation of the work on the TV Anytime/Anywhere application scenario. These applications are not only supported by the new DAVIC 1.5 Intranet, but also by QoS-guaranteed 1.4 networks, for which DAVIC issued the specifications during the previous meeting.

The DAVIC 1.5 Intranet architecture is built upon a standard IP network architecture. In order to support the TV Anytime/Anywhere scenarios on the Intranet, DAVIC added, among other things, network and control protocols. The following applications are currently supported in the DAVIC 1.5 Intranet architecture protocol suite:

• For the TV Anywhere scenario, tools for information flows of audio-visual material to DAVIC Intranet clients are supported. If necessary, these tools can also support audio-visual material with ‘television-like’ qualities. DAVIC Intranet clients can have their own flow or share a broadcast flow with other clients.
• For the TV Anytime scenario, also building on the availability of cheaper digital storage media, a number of tools is supported:
• Broadcast capture (the digital VCR) - users can instruct their local storage device (either in the home or in the network) to record or play programs, just as they are used to doing with their analogue VCRs.
• Dynamic viewing - users can tell the local storage server to record a streaming ‘live-feed’ and play it back in real-time. In this way, users can pause, stop and rewind real-time television programs to their hearts’ content.
• Segment jumping - users can instruct the local storage device to skip to a certain part of a stored stream.

To enable these applications the DAVIC Intranet architecture supports the (optional) use of RSVP for reservation of resources, the mandated use of IP Multicasting tools, of real-time transport protocols and of control protocols to enable local storage of audio-visual streams.

In short, the list of new specifications of DAVIC 1.5 includes, among other things:

Service/system descriptions and tools for TV Anytime/Anywhere:

• TV Anytime/Anywhere application scenarios;
• Generic system architecture for TV Anytime/Anywhere;
• Document architecture, models and tools;
• New content-coding formats for audio, video and speech;
• Jitter concealment tools; the DAVIC jitter specs describe the capabilities required, in addition to RSVP;
• Java application programming interfaces (APIs) for TV Anytime;
• Metadata for TV Anytime/Anywhere;
• Security tools and functions, such as content protection, security mechanisms, authentication and secure transactions;

System specifications for the DAVIC Intranet:

• Intranet design;

New tools for existing systems:

• Content protection framework;
• Cable-modem specifications;
• Access to DAVIC services and contents of WWW Browsers;
• Open-card API.

Future direction
DAVIC’s mandate to its Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (SPAC) is to submit proposals for new work items - systems and tools - to be included in the DAVIC specifications. The current SPAC, led by Arian Koster of KPN (Netherlands), presented their workplan for 1999 in Portland. Key issues are:

• Richer content, such as 3D-environments, and other content-coding formats which are currently not supported by the DAVIC specifications.
• Reversible scalability: adding extra information to content to enable quality up-scaling at the end-user.
• ‘Talk-back TV’ and ‘Talk-together TV’.
  The TV Anytime/Anywhere scenarios provide tools for users to select and locate content in a space-time world, but not to communicate with the content provider or with other users. DAVIC should include tools with which users can reply and, where possible, contribute to the content provider. This new feature is called Talk-back TV. In addition, users should be able to communicate with eachother, e.g. to share the experience of consuming the content, known as Talk-together TV.
• Usability ‘hooks’ for user interfaces. DAVIC should provide ‘hooks’ which permit user systems to support a wide range of user interfaces, e.g. remote control, keyboard and speech.

At the next DAVIC meeting - in April, Hamamatsu, Japan - a Call for Proposals for these new items will be issued. All relevant industrial players, member or non-member, are strongly encouraged to meet the challenge to contribute ideas and technologies in order to realise these ambitious innovations.

It’s DAVIC’s, so it works
DAVIC owes its unique place in the world of standardisation to two features. Firstly, DAVIC relies on the support of a large number of industry players from all over the world, who contribute to this standardisation work with great enthusiasm. Secondly, DAVIC specifies all elements of the entire service chain, from protocols to user interfaces and security.

These DAVIC-features assure users throughout the world that their audio-visual and interactive systems and applications will interoperate and interconnect easily.

As a result of this recognition, a process to promote the first series of DAVIC specifications (DAVIC 1.3) into an official international standard (within ISO-IEC) is ongoing and expected to be concluded around the June meeting.

For more information, please contact Mike Carr, President of DAVIC.

If you would like to receive these communications in future by email, please contact Teresa Marsico of the DAVIC secretariat (email: mailto:teresa.marsico@davic.org   or  mailto:secretariat@davic.org).

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