Standardised Remote User Interface and Home Networking Protocols for DTV

Broadband TV News is reporting on an initiative to produce a standardised remote user interface experience across multiple in-home devices, including Digital TV equipment. Article here. PCMag.com has a similar report and points out that the initiative appears to be aimed at a home gateway scenario.

The RVU alliance is formed by four companies, Broadcom, Cisco, DirecTV and Samsung and is described thus:

"an Oregon non-profit mutual benefit corporation, is a consortium of leading content service provider, semiconductor and consumer electronic companies gathered to advance the use of Remote User Interface (RUI) technology for home networked television entertainment, ensuring interoperability among devices implementing RVU's RUI technology, and educating the market about RVU technology."

The RVU Interface is based on DLNA and UPnP stacks. RVU covers the underlying necessary protocols:

• Addressing, Discovery, and Description
• Session Management
• Remote User Interface
• Media Transfer
• QoS and Diagnostics

Presumably it aims to plug the gaps in DLNA and uPnP that exist for digital TV equipment and video, or as they say to "leverage" the existing technologies. However, layering on these should mean RVU is network topology and transport medium indepedent.


A white paper is available, from which the above image is taken.