An industry group calling itself the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum has created a specification for software it hopes will be deployed by PC, set-top and television vendors to enable the display of all programming featuring internet content, delivered through all forms of transport, including analog or digital TV, cable or satellite. CableLabs Inc, the Tele- Communications Inc-driven cable industry consortium and Intel Corp are behind the spec which draws on HTML, internet protocol and ECMAscript (JavaScript). The group – which is backed by Microsoft, Sony and a host of US broadcasters – says the spec will enable content creators to develop programming with associated data services in the knowledge that it will run on any broadcast receiver. CableLabs says that current internet TV services such as Intercast, Wink, WebTV and Worldgate, all use proprietary systems and will need to include support for the ATVEF spec if it is ratified by the acronym soup of computer and broadcast standards bodies – W3C, DVB, ATSC, SMPTE – to which it’s being submitted. CableLabs says the spec would become part of the application environment in its OpenCable specification for set-tops. For cable and set-top companies it would be a minor software upgrade, CableLabs claims.
