DVB Liaisons

The 3D@Home Consortium was formed in 2008 with the mission to speed the commercialization of 3D into homes worldwide and provide the best possible viewing experience by facilitating the development of standards, roadmaps and education for the entire 3D industry - from content, hardware and software providers to consumers. The purpose of the liaison between the two consortia is to encourage the development of standards for 3DTV, to share knowledge about 3D viewing, and to ensure that their work is complementary.

ARIB is the Japanese Association of Radio Industries and Businesses, responsible for establishing standards, cooperating withother overseas organisations and providing for the smooth introduction of digital terrestrial televisionbroadcasting. GEM forms the core of the ARIB B.23 application execution engine platform.

ATIS is the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions. DVB cooperates with ATIS in the development and promotion of standards in IPTV architecture, digital rights management, content protection and copy management, and quality of service metrics.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee, based in the US, develops voluntary standards for terrestrial digital television broadcasting. Its middleware platform, ACAP, is closely related to the cable industry's OCAP standard, and both are based on a GEM core.

The Blu-ray Disc Association is the group of companies dedicated to developing and promoting the Blu-ray Disc format. BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java), which is based on GEM, is the interactive platform used to deliver advanced content and applications.

Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs) is a non-profitresearch and development consortium dedicated to developing newcable telecommunications technologies, primarily for the North American cable industry. DVB and CableLabs cooperate closely on GEM, which is the basis of the CableLabs OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform) specification, now marketed as tru2way.

CI Plus is a technical specification that adds additional security and features to the proven DVB Common Interface Standard that will allow CI Plus compatible consumer electronic devices, such as integrated digital televisions and set-top boxes, access to a wide range of Pay TV services via plug-in CI Plus Modules.

DASH-IF is an industry forum whose purposes include aligning, harmonizing and coordination of MPEG-DASH standard development and related standard developments in various standard organizations and consortia, and assisting in avoiding fragmentation of the multimedia HTTP streaming market by creating and promoting careful and limited profiling of the MPEG-DASH standard and by promoting the use of common profiles across industry, consortia and various standard organizations. DASH-IF is currently developing the DASH-AVC/264 IMPLEMENTATION guidelines, encompassing a specific subset of MPEG-DASH profiles together with video, audio , and closed caption formats, and a set of defined common encryption constraints. DASH-IF wishes to obtain and distribute within DASH-IF certain DVB requirements, and to exchange information with DVB on its DASH profiling, for example on the DASH subset that DVB is presently reviewing for definition.

The Digital Living Network Alliance brings together companies that share a vision of a wired and wireless interoperable network of Personal Computers, Consumer Electronics and mobile devices in the home enabling a seamless environment for sharing and growing new digital media and content services. DVB and DLNA cooperate in the areas of content protection, IPTV and home networks.

The ENGINES project (Enabling Next GeneratIon NEtworks for broadcast Services) aims at constituting a Task Force to support development of the Digital Video Broadcasting-Next Generation Handheld (DVB-NGH) standard. In addition, ENGINES shall provide means for the verification and validation of advanced features of the DVB-T2 and the DVB-NGH standards.

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV or “HbbTV” is a major pan‐European initiative aimed at harmonising the broadcast and broadband delivery of entertainment services to the end consumer through connected TVs and set‐top boxes. The HbbTV specification was developed by industry leaders to effectively manage the rapidly increasing amount of content available targeted at today’s end consumer. It is based on elements of existing specifications including OIPF (Open IPTV Forum), CEA, DVB and W3C. The HbbTV consortium has over 60 members including many DVB Member companies.

The J-ORTIGIA project is the follow up of the successful ESA project named ORTIGIA, focused on studying and validating the technical and related business feasibility of launching a family of Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) using new satellite resources in S-band. With the financial support of ESA and Solaris Mobile, J-ORTIGIA intends to carry out on-field trials, through a real satellite link, aiming at demonstrating and optimizing the performance of the DVB-SH standard for provision of broadcasting services to vehicular and handheld terminals in a cost-effective way by the interworking of satellite systems with terrestrial networks.

KOBETA is the Korean Broadcasting Engineers and Technicians Association. DVB signed a memorandum of understanding with KOBETA in November 2005. Representatives of both organisations meet regularly with a view to sharing information and knowledge.

After analogue switch off in November 2011, a part of UHF spectrum should be re-allocated to mobile operators for multimedia applications. So in order to harmonize standards, to avoid market fragmentation and to encourage the take-off of broadcasting, M3 (Mobile Multi-Media) project will study in which extent next generation broadcasting 3GPP (E-MBMS Evolved Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast System and/or its advanced version) and DVB (DVB-NGH Next Generation Handheld) standards could be merged. This project will in a first step analyse broadcasting ecosystems, and then propose use cases for multimedia applications and enhancements of current business models in order to guarantee the success of future deployments. In a second step, the project will study the commonalities between 3GPP E-MBMS and future DVB-NGH standards not only at the physical layer, but also at higher layers (optimisation of the service convergence). A specific point will answer how an E-MBMS frame could be embedded in a DVB-T2 Future Extension Frame, likely to carry Next Generation Handheld system.

The Open IPTV Forum was created in March 2007, to provide an IPTV solution enabling a plug-and-play experience for the end-user. This easy-to-use experience requires quite a lot of advanced techniques behind the scenes and the different players in the IPTV value chain therefore needed to have a tool to easily develop their own products to fit into the plug-and-play solution. The tool is the open standards that are created in this Open IPTV Forum.

The Open Mobile Alliance is an industry forum committed to the development of mobile service enabler specifications, to support the creation of interoperable end-to-end mobile services. OMA cooperates with the DVB Project on technologies related to mobile TV, particularly at the service layer above DVB-H or DVB-SH. The key DVB specification in this area is DVB-IPDC, whilst BCAST and DLDRM are the relevant specifications on the OMA side.

The WorldDMB Forum is an international non-governmental organisation whose aim is to aid the introduction of radio, mobile TV and datacasting services based on the Eureka 147 DAB system. DMB stands for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting. DVB cooperates with WorldDMB at a technical level where it is of mutual benefit to do so.