TiVo Inc. and Replay Networks, pioneers of a new class of hard-disk-based personal digital recorders, joined the TV Anytime Forum last week, boosting total membership to 53 companies. And the European MyTV consortium launched a project to build a prototype Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) system that complies with the TV Anytime specs.

Those specifications aim to provide "a common means to identify content," wherever it may be, and "a common method to lead a viewer to its logical and physical location," said forum chairman Simon Parnall.

The forum's goal is to help consumers find, select and capture the digital content they want, and to view it when they like, regardless of where the content sits or whether it is delivered via satellite, cable, terrestrial lines or the Internet, Parnall said. Consumers will use a range of devices that employ hard-disk drives, recordable digital video disk drives or flash memory subsystems, he said

TV Anytime-compliant devices with local storage would allow viewers to see a program in part or in whole in any order, anytime. The system would also offer enhanced interactivity and hooks to allow links to other devices. The idea is to "combine the immediacy of television with the flexibility of the Internet."

Inevitable merger

"Investors and corporate CEOs are very aware of the inevitable merger of broadcast and Internet businesses," said Parnall, pointing to the proposed merger of AOL and Time Warner. But, he warned, "What they don't know is the vast technology development that's got to happen" to make such a promise happen for consumers and service providers.

Without a standard means of identifying and referencing content and an agreed-upon framework for protecting their copyrights, content creators, broadcasters, network providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and consumers might fail to take advantage of the benefits of digital convergence for their own businesses, said Parnall.

The forum is currently drafting its requirements in three distinct technology areas: metadata, content referencing and rights management. The group will publish those requirements at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in early April. Then it will call for the submission of technologies that meet the requirements. First specs are due in July.

Europe's MyTV consortium plans to complete a working prototype DVB system based on those specs in the third quarter of 2001. The prototype will test interoperability among TV Anytime-compliant systems and services.

The European Commission-funded MyTV project — with members from the BBC, Nokia, NDS, Philips and others — is racing to finish its system. "We're not waiting for the TV Anytime Forum to finish" the entire spec, said Ronald Tol, research scientist at Philips Research (Eindhoven, Netherlands), a project leader for MyTV.

Forum members, too, feel the need for speed. "We believe we've only got months," not years, to finish development of the specifications, said Parnall.

Indeed, a variety of incompatible personal television systems and services are popping up, all vying for a share of the emerging personal digital recorder market. The TV Anytime Forum believes the best way to proceed is to develop specifications that take advantage of local storage without tying it to any particular service provider or set-top box.

"The industry wants to move away from a vertically integrated business model to a horizontal market model," said David Wilson, principal system architect at the system development group at NDS. "The potential market is so much bigger" than the market now served by companies such as Tivo and Replay Networks, he added.

"The TV industry needs to create a new paradigm for rights management that makes content accessible to consumers but without the possibility of abuse," said Albert Stienstra, general manager, technology strategy and planning at Philips Business Electronics.

Forum participants range from broadcasters like the BBC, France's Canal+ and Japan's NHK; telecom giants such as BT, France Telecom, Japan's NTT and GTE Labs; consumer .electronics companies including LG Electronics, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp and Sony; computer companies such as IBM and Microsoft, and software companies like Open TV and Liberate Technologies.