It looks as if Microsoft Corp and Intel Corp won’t get all their own way in the emerging Home Networking market. Just as the TV companies strongly resisted efforts by the computer industry to influence the future development directions of their products, now eight consumer electronics firms have announced a core home networks specification for audio visual electronics appliances, without including Microsoft or Intel in the deliberations. The eight are Grundig AG, Hitachi Ltd, Matsushita Electric Co Ltd, Philips Electronics NV, Sharp Corp, Sony Corp, Thomson Multimedia SA and Toshiba Corp, who plan to actively promote the HAVi Home Audio Video interoperability core specification as a standard for the AV and multimedia industries. The spec, released to interested companies, contains definitions of common middleware designed to help devices from multiple vendors to include plug and play connectivity and appliance interoperability, and to give consumer devices some level of future-proofing. The eight won’t depart too far from the computer industry, however, and will use the IEEE 1394 Firewire digital interface jointly developed by Sony and Apple Computer Corp as the basic interconnect. Firewire was recently the subject of a joint Home Networking agreement between Microsoft and Sony (CI No 3,386). Other elements in the specification include an event manager to keep track of changes in the network, a registry, maintaining information about appliances connected, a messaging system for communications, a defined device control module to represent an appliance on the network, a DCM manager for installation of devices, a data driven interaction controller for rendering a GUI on individual devices, a streams manager for audio visual streaming. Currently, such technologies as TCP/IP and Java are not mentioned in the document, but may emerge as the specification is further evolved. The current version is available on the web at the various member company web sites. Licensing terms will be made public in October, when a final version of the specification is expected. Both Microsoft and Intel have stated their intentions to enter the home networking market. Microsoft is working on versions of Windows CE and Windows 5.0 that can forge gateways between home networks and the Internet (CI No 3,360). Intel formed a home network division back in February, but gave few indications of the technology it would offer.
