New York — Tired of using a separate remote for every device in your living room? An industry partnership called Hana vows to simplify all that with the flick of a menu. If the alliance formed last week takes off as its founders intend, by this time next year Hana-ready televisions and the complementary audio and video components that tie into them will be under unified control on one TV screen.

Between the initial feasibility demonstrations next month at the International Consumer Electronics Show and the 2006 holiday season, the five founding companies — which come from the content, consumer electronics and information technology industries — hope to enhance the high-definition TV experience through the work of their High-definition Audio-video Network Alliance. Hana will create design guidelines for providing secure high-definition audiovisual networks in the home with HD products.

The charter members — Charter Communications, JVC, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, NBC Universal, Samsung and Sun Microsystems — together with contributing members ARM, Freescale Semiconductor and PulseLink, will be joined in the Hana Lounge at CES in Las Vegas by other companies interested in making Hana work.

Given the 2008 U.S. mandate for high-definition TV broadcasts, Hana's formation appears timely. But as with other industry alliances, Hana faces challenges as it strives to gain momentum in a market where a number of standards and industry groups are vying to shape the face of next-generation consumer electronics. Whereas the other initiatives approach the home network from a PC perspective, Hana comes at it from the consumer side.

The brainchild of Samsung, Hana builds on the Federal Communications Commission's mandate that FireWire — the IEEE 1394 interface specification — be built into all new digital TVs. As Hana sees it, all the functionality of devices tied to the television by FireWire cable be-comes software-manageable via menus on the screen.

Increasingly, content is being delivered to the home over broadband connections that terminate at the PC, but most consumers do not want to watch movies and TV shows, or listen to music, on their computers. Moreover, building a home net from the PC side entails complex middleware — and a separate encoder — in each consumer box that joins the network.

The Hana-based home network is DTV-centric, with all tuning and decoding hardware residing inside the digital TV. The PC becomes another networked system. Consumers will thus be able to send personal content from PCs to audio/video devices while keeping protected content secure, and will be able to add any device to the home network with just one cable or via a wireless hub.

"Hana is a milestone among industry alliances because we are starting in the living room, not the home office," said Hana president Heemin Kwon, the executive vice president and general manager of the Digital Solution Center at Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. "Since Hana is a cross-industry effort with members from each of the impacted HD industries, we can achieve the 'win-win' necessary to commercialize HD networks."

Hana's members will not be inventing anything new. Instead, the alliance, which has an address in Portland, Ore., will rely on existing off-the shelf technologies to reach its lofty goals.

Its mission is to create industry design guidelines, utilizing existing technology and specifications, that will enable consumers to view, pause and record at least five HD channels simultaneously anywhere in the home with a single remote control per room, without compromising quality-of-service — and all via one set-top box.

"A major benefit of Hana's initiatives will be the ability for one remote control to manage all of the video equipment that gets connected to a Hana network," said Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst at In-Stat.

Hana-compliant products are expected to include HDTVs, next-generation DVD players, personal video recorders, set-top cable boxes and home theaters. The first commercial products are expected to be available at CES in 2007. By that time, enhanced HDTVs, network interface units, audiovisual hard drives and personal video recorders supporting Hana are slated to emerge, said Kevin Morrow, director of business development for Samsung's Digital Solution Center. Next-generation DVDs, game consoles and other devices will follow later that year.

The alliance plans to facilitate compatibility among various manufacturers' products through compliance testing and Hana-organized developers' conferences.

Its first connectivity target for a Hana network is the 1394 FireWire cabling specification. Hana has formalized an agreement with the 1394 Trade Association to connect devices while eliminating the tangle of cables used to link today's TVs with home theaters, DVD players and other gear. The aim, Kwon said, is a single-wire 1394 connection capable of transmitting multiple high-definition data streams. The link will be hot-pluggable, he added, allowing devices to be connected and disconnected without having to power down.

The equally important secondary goal, the use of a single remote control, will be accomplished by software downloads to the digital television encoder and tuner mandated for every new DTV. As a result, the user would browse a menu on the TV screen and "softly" control the functions of each interconnected device. Thus, a single decoder and tuner within the television itself could manipulate the controls of all peripheral, connected equipment, as well as pick the desired program to watch — eliminating the need for separate encoders in each A/V device.

Hana plans to negotiate with standards bodies such as the Consumer Electronics Association, CableLabs, Motion Picture Association of America and Advanced Television Systems Committee for use of these groups' technologies to enable HD content sharing around the home.

In addition, Hana will work with the Advanced Access Content System, Open Media Commons and other digital rights management technologies to enable consumers to move content across multiple systems, such as portable video players on the home network, without infringing on original content rights, thus protecting content providers from piracy. Hana hopes that its anti-piracy measures will also speed the arrival of new HD content.

As part of its charter, Hana will also focus on advanced video-compression technologies, enhanced security and wireless extensions.

Mass adoption?
The Hana launch was held in NBC Universal's Studio 8H, the venue of Saturday Night Live, a program that spoofs the news of the week. But the Hana charter participants were quite serious about its goals: "[The word] hana in Korean means 'one,' in Japanese it means 'pretty flower,' and it is also a beautiful place on the island of Maui in Hawaii," said Kwon. "We aspire to all three definitions with Hana." The concept is "about enabling the whole home to experience digital TV," said Darren Feher, executive vice president and chief technology officer of NBC Universal.

Hana's proponents believe the spectrum of companies represented — specializing in content, consumer electronics and IT — will increase the likelihood of attracting new members and developing standards likely to gain mass adoption. "Together with content and service providers, IT and other CE companies, we can navigate the complexities to deliver HD service quality, content security and ease of use," asserted Kwon.

"You might ask yourself what a company known for its computer servers is doing being part of this alliance," said Glenn Edens, senior vice president and director of communications, media and entertainment at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. But CM&E represents a third of the company's business, said Edens, who runs all of the research and development at Sun Labs. The company's expertise in networking will be tapped for Hana's home-networking requirements, he said.

"We are conscious that Microsoft and Intel are in the home-networking space as well, and they are welcome to join Hana to make interoperability happen faster," Edens said.

Kwon emphasized that a Hana interoperability specification will be ready in the first quarter of 2006. "With the end goal of one remote controller for all your home equipment, we are brining a Windows system to the A/V world," said Kwon, alluding to the ease of use that Windows navigation has provided for the average computer owner. Kwon dismissed the notion that Hana, with only five charter members, is too small to make an impact. "The first year the Memory Stick was introduced, there were only eight players," he said. "Now the technology has been accepted by all."

"We are being pushed by edicts from agencies like the Federal Communications Commission to go digital," said Cahng-Ki Lee, senior manager for Samsung Electronics' New Business Development Group. "At the same time there is a confluence of technologies like FireWire, ultrawideband wireless and others that are mature enough to work with, to provide an enriched but simple home network where the display becomes the central tech hub for high-definition experiences."

With IEEE 1394 (FireWire) the only digital interface the FCC mandates in digital cable set-top boxes, Lee said, it's time to decide which functions to implement in hardware and which in software. By concentrating on the display and using a single Hana-compliant decoder there, all other devices need not have hardware encoders of their own. The display decoder can simply download information about these other devices for instant menu-based screen manipulation, using one remote controller.

Business models converge
Hana proponents believe that simplifying the consumer experience is directly related to the business models of the four industries Hana represents. In the CE business, profits generally come from higher-end products, including HDTV and sources of HD content. Service providers, meanwhile, depend on profits from billable services and see the hardware — set-top boxes, satellite receivers, modems — as only a means to an end, providing access to those services their customers have agreed to pay for.

For content owners, value is related to availability; the increased availability of content means increased profits, as long as strong copy protection and digital rights management (DRM) mechanisms are in place. For their part, IT providers derive profits from a combination of hardware, software and services.

The four business models are complementary, said Hana vice president Bob King, who is with Vulcan Inc., an investment firm launched by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and is also the vice president at Allen's Charter Communications. A Hana founding member, Charter is working on "simultrans" — the simultaneous transmission of channels in both analog and digital formats in the current transition period before the all-digital transmission mandate.

King contends that in Hana's world, everybody wins: CE companies make money selling hardware that stores, plays back and displays content delivered by service providers. Service providers reduce their capital expenditures, eliminating the need for a set-top box at every TV.

Now that Congress has mandated that every DTV include a digital tuner (and therefore an MPEG decoder), consumers will obtain a higher-quality picture from MPEG sources such as the set-top's 1394 port, he argued. The box (or cable card) becomes simply a toll booth for MPEG packets. All of this requires networks and network services, storage and software — the domain of IT companies. The PC is still an important part of the picture as well. But instead of being the point where broadband networks terminate, it becomes just one more connected device.

According to King, Hana leaves it up to consumers to decide where they want to be entertained. But achieving this vision requires interoperability and, more important, a simple user interface so the consumer does not have to relearn everything for each new system installed.

In a Hana scheme, any device can be connected to any other device with a single 1394 cable, common across all systems. The user interface is then delivered over the 1394 link using well-established Web technologies — browsers and Web servers. A connected device is selected using the digital TV's own remote control, whereupon that device serves up its own user interface for display on the DTV.

Hana-enabled products will present the consumer with a top-level menu on the digital TV that shows all the devices that are connected. This menu can be defined by the DTV or by a Hana-compliant set-top box, satellite receiver or Internet Protocol TV set-top. (In the case of a cable card-enabled digital TV, the card will provide the interface to the services and simply forward the digital content — MPEG-2, MPEG-4, program guide and so on — to the DTV for decoding and display.)

For the content owner, basic security is provided through the use of 1394 and the already approved Digital Transmission Content Protection license. Hana will be working on advanced solutions with interoperable DRM and copyright detection that will create a secure home network, the alliance said, giving consumers increased access to and more flexible use of premium content. Additionally, Hana will work on a solution to ensure that protected content cannot be sent back out over the Internet, unless allowed under the terms agreed to by the content owner and the consumer or service provider.

For intellectual-property providers like ARM, the Hana alliance portends only good tidings. "We act as sort of a broker between the CE device manufacturers and the silicon companies in providing the essential cores stacked with the appropriate functions, such as soft DRM," said Bob Morris, North American solutions manager at ARM. "At CES we will be showing our solutions for Hana-enabled devices."

— Additional reporting by Spencer Chin