Global Standardization Activities

Recent Activities of the TV-AnytimeForum
Masahito Kawamori
Abstract
The TV-Anytime Forum is a standardization organization that is specifying open standards for global
content distribution services in which broadcasting and telecommunications work together to enable theviewer to watch programs anytime and anywhere. This article describes recent activities of the TV-Anytime Forum and its specifications, which have recently been adopted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

1. Introduction
Hard-disk drives (HDDs) have been growing everlarger and their market prices ever lower. In 2000, a
10-GB HDD (able to store approximately 4 hours of6-Mbit/s content) sold for $100, but in 2005 the same
price gave consumers an HDD that could store 100
hours of 6-Mbit/s content. HDD size has been doubling every ten months, so a simple extrapolation predicts that in 2010, $100 should buy a 16-TB HDD
that can store all the TV programs on 7 channels, 24hours a day for a whole month. Such a massive HDD
will require a correspondingly huge-capacity network to deliver the content. Under these circumstances, it is irrelevant to the viewer whether he/she iswatching programs in real time via broadcasting or
on-demand content delivered either via a video-ondemand service or from storage. One can view TV
programs anytime one wants.
2. What is the TV-Anytime Forum?
The TV-Anytime Forum [1] is an international consortium dedicated to specifying technical standards
for new TV broadcasting services within the context
of the convergence between broadcasting andtelecommunications. The Forum started as a successor to DAVIC (Digital Audio Visual Council), which† NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories
Yokosuka-shi, 239-0847 Japan
E-mail: kawamori.masahito@lab.ntt.co.jp

Vol. 4 No. 3 Mar. 2006

was an industry standardization organization specifying protocols and interfaces for multimedia interactive service, such as video on demand. The Forum’s
goal for standardization has been to specify standards
for interoperable distribution of multimedia content
in broadcasting and communications based on largevolume storage and the Internet.
The current members include broadcasters such as
the European Broadcasting Union, the BBC, NHK,NTV, TBS, FujiTV, and BSkyB; media companies
like Disney, Nielsen, Dentsu, and Hakuhodo; manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp,Samsung, LG, Philips, Thomson, and Motorola; andcomputer/communications companies likeMicrosoft, NTT, and France Telecom. Membership
hit a high of more than 200 companies, and there are
currently about 60 paid-up member companies.
The Forum produces not only specifications for
systems based on storage functions, but also for system models covering the whole value-chain including
content creation, transmission, the delivery network,
and integrated receiver terminals. It aims to provide
standards for general content distribution services
that integrate, using storage capability, broadcasting
and telecommunications, allowing users to enjoy
content anytime, anywhere. One of the Forum’s policies is to create open standards for a horizontal market. For that purpose, the Forum takes interoperability with other standardization bodies very seriously,
and it has liaison relationships with various organizations, such as MPEG (Moving Picture ExpertsGroup), SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Tele77

Global Standardization Activities

vision Engineers), and ARIB (Association of Radio
Industries and Businesses) for video-and-broadcasting-related standards, as well as W3C (World WideWeb Consortium), OASIS (Organization for theAdvancement of Structured Information Standards),and the Liberty Alliance.
3. Activities of the TV-Anytime Forum
After its formation in 1999, the TV-Anytime Forumset up its Memorandum of Understanding and its policy on intellectual property, acquired a not-for-profit
organization status in the state of Delaware in theUSA in December 2001, and established the governing body of the Forum.
The standardization work is conducted in the following groups. The governing board decides on thedirection of the Forum as a whole. The service
requirements and business models are specified bythe Business Models Working Group. The Systems,
Transport Interfaces and Content Referencing Working Group specifies the reference model of the TVAnytime system and guidelines for implementationand operation. The Metadata Working Group specifies metadata to be used in the TV-Anytime system.
The Rights Management and Protection Working
Group defines the content protection mechanism andthe rightful use of content. In addition to these working groups, a task force group is working with IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force) to register the TVAnytime in IETF so that the specifications will beincorporated into the general framework of the Internet.
In 2002, in order to release specifications in a timely manner, the Forum froze its Phase 1 specifications,which mainly concern the broadcasting (unidirectional) aspects of the standards. At the same time, thefirst calls for requirements for the Phase 2 specifications were made in March 2002, followed by calls fortechnical contributions in August 2002, which furtheradvanced the specification activities. The final version of the Phase 2 specifications was published inAugust 2005, and the Forum now is moving ahead tothe next phase.

erencing that allows uniform management and resolution of identifiers and locations in broadcasting andInternet content. The third is Rights Management andProtection (RMP) technology that provides securecontent delivery. These technologies are important
for TV-Anytime Forum’s policy that its specifications
should enable interoperability in a network-transparent manner.
While Phase 1 is mainly devoted to unidirectional,
broadcasting aspects of the TV-Anytime model, Phase
2 is more concerned with broader aspects such as
bidirectional services, interactivity, rich content(including karaoke), and mobile services. Since theTV-Anytime Forum, as an industrial consortium, isnot a suitable organization for maintaining specifications for a long period of time, it proposed its Phase 1
specification to the European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (ETSI) [2], which adopted it as its
technical specification entitled “Broadcast and Online Services: Search, select, and rightful use of content on personal storage systems (TV-Anytime)”(ETSI TS 102 822). The ETSI specifications are listed in Table 1.
5. Relationships with other standardization bodies
Besides ETSI, the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) Project, which is a European standardization
organization for digital television, has also adopted
the TV-Anytime Forum specifications in its variousstandards. In Japan, ARIB adopted the TV-Anytime
specification in February 2004 and published it as
ARIB-STD-B38 “Coding, Transmission and Storage
Specification for Broadcasting System Based on
Home Servers”, the standard for home-server-based
broadcasting.
The TV-Anytime Forum has also been working with
IETF, and as a result, the prefix “tva” is currently registered as a namespace in IETF. The string “crid”,
which stands for “content reference identification”[4], has also been registered as one of its URI (uniform resource identifier) schemes, on a par with http,ftp, and others [5].

4. Specifications of TV-Anytime Forum

6. Real services based on TV-Anytimespecifications

The TV-Anytime Forum has been concentrating on
three main areas that are important for anytime viewing of programs. One is standardized metadata (syntax and semantics) for both broadcast and Internetcontent. The second is specifications for content ref-The broadcasters and manufacturers in the UK andsome other European countries set up in 2004 a consortium called “TV-Anytime Testbed” that experiments with the implementation of the DVB flavor ofthe TV-Anytime specifications. Since then, it has been

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Global Standardization Activities

Table 1. ETSI specifications for TV-Anytime.
1

ETSI TS 102 822-1

Benchmark Features

2

ETSI TS 102 822-2

System Description

3

ETSI TS 102 822-3-1

Metadata: Metadata Schemas

4

ETSI TS 102 822-3-2

Metadata: System Aspects in a Uni-directional Environment

5

ETSI TS 102 822-3-3

Metadata: Phase 2 Extended Metadata Schemas

6

ETSI TS 102 822-3-4

Metadata: Interstitial Metadata

7

ETSI TS 102 822-4

Content Referencing

8

ETSI TS 102 822-5-1

Rights Management and Protection (RMP): RMP Informationfor Broadcast Applications

9ETSI TS 102 822-5-2

Rights Management and Protection (RMP): Binding of Rights
Management and Protection Information

10ETSI TS 102 822-6-1

Delivery of Metadata over a Bi-directional Network: Serviceand Transport

11

ETSI TS 102 822-6-2

Delivery of Metadata over a Bi-directional Network: ServiceDiscovery

12

ETSI TS 102 822-6-3

Delivery of Metadata over a Bi-directional Network: Exchangeof Personal Profile

13

ETSI TS 102 822-7

Bi-directional Metadata Delivery Protection

14

ETSI TS 102 822-8

Interchange Data Format

15

ETSI TS 102 822-9

Remote Programming

actively testing various aspects of the specifications
in order to ascertain its viability. Actual services areexpected to start in 2007. In response to this, Germany and Scandinavian countries are also working
toward actual services. In Japan, major broadcasters
and manufacturers have set up a consortium that willdefine the implementation specification for thedeployment of TV-Anytime services, i.e., serverbased broadcasting, which is targeted at the year
2007.
7. Activities of NTT
NTT has been active in the Forum since its earlydays and has been playing an influential role. In bothPhase 1 and Phase 2, NTT took the initiative in specifying some of the documents. In Phase 2 in particular, the document “Exchange of Personal Profile”(ETSI TS 102 822-6-3) is based on a proposal thatNTT contributed through the liaison relationship with
the Liberty Alliance [6]. This specification is also
based on the Liberty Alliance and is an important
standard from the standpoint of interoperability
between broadcasting and communications. Moreover, NTT contributed much, through documents andleadership, throughout Phase 2, and this was recognized by the Forum, which gave awards to the memVol. 4 No. 3 Mar. 2006

bers from NTT in 2005.
8. TV-Anytime Forum from now on
Now that the specifications of Phase 1 and Phase 2
have been completed, the focus of TV-Anytime activities is shifting to more regionalized activities, including implementations and businesses based on thespecifications in various regions. In Europe, the TVAnytime European Users Group has officially beenorganized and is very active in its preparation for thedeployment of the specifications and in promotion
efforts and negotiations concerning the licensing ofthe TV-Anytime specifications. These negotiations
are open to members from other areas. Elsewhere,
members from Japan and Korea organized a preparatory meeting for TV-Anytime Asia-Pacific in Tokyoin October 2005. Some of the issues expected to beactively discussed in the TV-Anytime Asia-Pacificincluded regionally relevant topics such as charactersand languages as well as adaptation to various cultures. Moreover, because of the rapid growth ofmobile and broadband services in this region, the profiling of the specifications to meet the needs of these
specific services is deemed important and urgent.

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References
Masahito Kawamori[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]

[5]
[6]
[7]

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http://www.tv-anytime.org
http://www.etsi.org/
http://www.tv-anytime.org/press/02-10-03.html
N. Earnshaw, S. Aoki, A. Ashley, and W. Kameyama, “The TV-Anytime Content Reference Identifier,” http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4078.txt
W. Kameyama, “A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for
the TV-Anytime Forum,” http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4195.txt
http://www.projectliberty.org
K. Kawazoe, T. Yamaguchi, M. Kawamori, and J. Kishigami, “TheRecent Trend in the TV-Anytime Forum and NTT’s Approach to
Telecommunication Broadcasting Convergence,” NTT TechnicalJournal, Vol. 13, No. 8, pp. 66-68, 2001.

Senior Research Engineer, NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories.
After joining in 1989 the Information ScienceLaboratory, NTT Basic Research Laboratories,
he has worked in research areas such as artificial
intelligence, language processing, and interactive agents using speech recognition. His current
research areas are media delivery for broadcasting and broadband communications, metadata
and rights language, and the convergence ofmobile and fixed communications services.
Since 2000, he has been the leader of the Metadata Task Group of the Business Working Groupfor Broadcasting Systems based on a Home Server, the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB), which has been instrumental inspecifying ARIB-STD-B-38. He is also a convener of the TV-Anytime Forum, chairing theMetadata Working Group.

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