Today the TV-Anytime Forum, the collective of PVR industry-luminaries and deep-thinkers, announced it would soon complete its second, and final phase of the PVR standard.
The new phase, whose scope will be frozen in November 2004 will include
- enabling the saving of interactive TV content to be saved to a PVR
- a metadata framework enabling innovative advertising models for PVR’s
- rights management of content, allowing transfer of programming between devices
We think that the first of these, allowing interactive TV (iTV) content to be saved to the correctly equipped PVR, is the most exciting. The playback of timeshifted iTV content has been the significant missing piece as far we’ve been concerned and if they achieve a standard that can work with any format of iTV content, they will have done very well.
The initial phase, which was been passed as an ETSI standard (TS 102 822 – “Broadcast and on-line services: Search, select, and rightful use of content on personal storage system”, is being implemented in Europe, the US and Japan, with PVR’s with enhanced functionality expected to launch during 2005.
Commenting on its widespread adoption, Simon Parnell, chair of TV-Anytime, “The adoption of TVA’s first specification by DVB, ARIB and ATSC shows how important this work will prove to be for the widespread adoption of PVR standards the public can reply on.”