The FreeTV Alliance, which represents four of Europe’s free-to-view satellite operators, has issued its first suite of technical specifications.
The Remote Control Specification is designed to offer a common way for an operator’s mobile application to control the TV viewing experience on the TV screen. The release is in-line with one of the Alliance’s stated objectives to provide a common set of technical specifications for the television industry based on open standards.
It will be adopted by Alliance members Fransat (France), Freesat (UK), HD PLUS (Germany), and Tivùsat (Italy).
“This new specification initiative is absolutely in-line with the stated aim of the Alliance to promote the harmonisation of satellite TV services and technology across Europe,” said Alberto Sigismondi, CEO of TivuSat and the Chair of the FreeTV Alliance. “All four founding members are looking forward to working with our hardware partners through the testing phase and then to implementing the first of these specifications in the very near future.”
Commenting on the announcement of the new specification from the DVB World Forum in Copenhagen Matthew Huntington, CTO of Freesat, said: “I am very pleased to be able to confirm that the FreeTV Alliance is releasing its first technical specification – the first in a suite of technologies that will help to remove complexities for manufacturers and provide better services for all of our viewers.”
Over the next 12 months the Alliance is also planning:
- Remote record specification – provides a common way that a PVR capable television device can work with an Internet based remote record service.
- Common device certificate scheme – will enable manufacturers to manage a single set of device identify certificates across multiple operators.
- DRM Framework for SAT>IP – will enhanced the SAT>IP standard to support the conversion from broadcast CA to DRM for secure in-home content distribution.
- Operator application management specification – will define an applications life cycle and required APIs for HTML based operator applications and portals for television devices.