5th June 2003

Tokyo, 5th June 2003 - ARIB, the Japanese TV standards body, approved ARIB datacasting standard B-23 "Application Execution Engine Platform for Digital Broadcasting"(ARIB-AE) based on DVB-GEM (TS 102 819).

The move was strongly welcomed by DVB, Peter MacAvock (DVB) said "GEM's aim is to harmonise middleware systems in order to promote application interoperability - write an application once and it will run on any DVB-MHP GEM based terminal. We congratulate ARIB on this significant step."

ARIB iTV applications running on ISDB-S services in Japan are currently based on BML (Broadcast Markup Language), and GEM based B-23 will provide a much needed support for procedural content in ISDB iTV. Japan's satellite market is divided between ISDB-S and DVB-S systems.

GEM was produced by the DVB's MHP Umbrella Group (MUG), chaired by Bill Foote (Sun). The group has worked tirelessly produce GEM firstly based on CableLabs OCAP, then on ARIB's datacasting standard. DVB's work continues, as the GEM version formalising ARIBs inclusion has yet to be published - this will be completed when some housekeeping issued have been resolved.