Web and TV Interest Group Charter

The mission of the Web and TV Interest Group, part of the Web and TV Activity, is to provide a forum for technical discussions to identify use cases and requirements that existing and/or new specifications need to meet to achieve a tighter support of TV and other Media services on the Web Platform.

End date: 30 November 2014
Confidentiality: Proceedings are public
Chairs:
Team Contacts:
Regular Meeting Schedule
- Teleconferences: Teleconferences to be held as required. Task Forces may have separate calls that will not overlap with others
- Face-to-face: Up to 3 per year as required

Scope

The Web and TV Interest Group's scope covers the distribution of TV and other media services over a variety of distribution channels (IP, satellite and terrestrial broadcasting, cable, telecomm, etc) to a variety of devices (TV-sets, phones, tablets, PCs, etc).

The tasks that the Interest Group will undertake include:

Identification of requirements for tighter support of media-centric applications on the Web Platform
Identification of gaps in the Web Platform that do not allow the identified requirements to be met
Review of deliverables under development by other W3C groups that are relevant to the IG scope and report bugs as appropriate
Liaison with other organizations in the media industry that are using the Web Platform for their technical specifications and/or their services to foster alignment and interoperability on a global scale

Note:

In general, technical development of standards is not in scope for the Interest Group; however, the Group may draft technical proposals to better clarify what are the identified gaps and envisioned changes to the Web Platform.

Success Criteria

We have succeeded if we can achieve the following:

Participation via mailing list subscription and postings from people representing various stakeholder communities, including broadcasters, hardware and software developers, telecomm companies, cable operators, application developers, regulators, and users
Members of the Interest Group join relevant Working Groups and drive the development of work items
Members of the Interest Group join related Community/Business Groups and contribute to creating notes
Constructive feedback on W3C deliverables posted for review on the Web and TV IG mailing list
Successfully engage and coordinate with other organizations in the media industry

Deliverables

The primary deliverables of the Web and TV Interest Group are IG notes that identify requirements for existing and/or new technical specifications, gaps in the Web Platform and, optionally, illustrate possible technical solutions to fill those gaps.

In addition, the group will review and comment on documents generated by the other W3C groups and may review documents coming from external organizations.

During the F2F meeting at TPAC 2012, the group identified a preliminary list of topics and goals that members want to work on:

Testing
- Identify requirements for testing from a “Web and TV” perspective
- Talk to other W3C groups and to external organizations
Recording and Downloading Media
- Identify requirements for recording and downloading media
Terminal Capabilities
- Investigate requirements to discover and control device capabilities (e.g. tuner control)
Content Metadata Exposure and Content Synchronization
- Investigate how to expose TV metadata to web applications
- Investigate mapping between media element APIs and in-band metadata
- Synchronization up to "frame accurate"
Stereoscopic 3D Web
- Investigate impact of 3D Video/Graphics on HTML and other web standards
TTML / WebVTT Coexistence
- Collect the different TTML/SMPTE-TT based specs used by the industry and pass them onto the Timed Text WG
- Try to define a strategy for caption-technology coexistence
- Follow the ongoing effort to map TTML and WebVTT
- Share these caption-technology information with relevant groups

Timelines

The IG will, during its life time, undertake different activities that may proceed in parallel. No specific timeline has been identified at this point, but the various activities are intended to be running for a short period of time (2-4 months), with the possibility of running a few iterations of them.

Dependencies and Liaisons

W3C Groups

Groups that the IG will most likely cooperate with are:

Web and Broadcasting BG
Device APIs and Policy WG
Geolocation WG
HTML WG
Internationalization Core WG
Multimodal Interaction WG
Semantic Web Activity
SVG WG
SYMM WG
Voice Browser WG
Protocols and Formats WG
Web Applications WG
CoreMob CG
System Applications WG
Web Media Text Track CG
Timed Text WG
CSS WG
Web Performance WG

External Groups

There are a number of external groups working in areas related to the ones in scope for the Web and TV IG. The Interest Group should determine whom to communicate with and then maintain communication with them. The following groups are likely to be important:

ANSI

The American National Standards Institute is a private, non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the US.

ARIB

The Association of Radio Industries and businesses is aimed to conduct investigation, research & development and consultation of utilization of radio waves from the view of developing radio industries, and to promote realization and popularization of new radio systems in the field of telecommunications and broadcasting.

ATSC

The Advanced Television Systems Committee provides standards for digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable, and satellite networks.

CableLabs

Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. is a non-profit research and development consortium that has cable operators as its members, and works for requirements for new technologies and new services.

CEA

The Consumer Electronics Association is the trade organization for the consumer electronics industry in the US, which promotes U.S. consumer technology industry through technology policy, events, research, promotion and the fostering of business and strategic relationships. CEA sponsors the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

DECE (a.k.a UltraViolet)

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem is a consortium of major Hollywood studios, consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers, network hardware vendors, system integrators, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) vendors.

DLNA

Digital Living Network Alliance produces open standards and widely-available industry specifications for entertainment devices and home networks.

DVB Project

The Digital Video Broadcasting Project is an industry-led consortium of broadcasters, manufacturers, network operators, software developers, regulatory bodies and others in over 35 countries committed to designing open technical standards for the global delivery of digital television and data services.

EBU

The European Broadcasting Union is an alliance of public service media organizations, comprising 74 Active Members in 56 countries and 37 Associate Members from a further 22 countries. Its mission is to defend the interests of public service media (PSM) and to promote their indispensible contribution to modern society.

ETSI

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies.

HbbTV consortium

The HbbTV consortium is a pan‐European initiative founded by both television broadcasters and CE companies and is aimed at providing an alternative to proprietary technologies and delivering an open platform for broadcasters to deliver value added on‐demand services to the end consumer.

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force is an open-standards development organization which develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite.

IPTVF-J

IPTV Forum Japan was established to promote the standardization of IPTV receivers and services and also promote the wide use and enhancement of defined standards. It aims to achieve this by standardizing technical specifications that provide current and future receivers with IPTV capability and thereby allow broadcasting and telecommunication to coexist.

ITU-T

ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is the part of the UN agency ITU that defines elements in information and communication technologies infrastructure. Their work includes Multimedia Application Framework for IPTV services. For example, H.762: Lightweight interactive multimedia framework for IPTV services (LIME) gives a subset of HTML, CSS and ECMAScript for use in IPTV terminals.

MPEG

The Moving Picture Experts Group is a working group of ISO/IEC in charge of the development of standards for coded representation of digital audio, video and related data.

OASIS

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a not-for-profit consortium that promotes industry consensus and produces worldwide standards for security, Cloud computing, SOA, Web services, the Smart Grid, electronic publishing, emergency management, and other areas.

OIPF

The Open IPTV Forum publishes free-of-charge, standards-based specifications for end-to-end IPTV services essential to an eco-system delivering "plug and play" interoperability to the end consumer. It works with members of the communications and entertainment industry, including network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, and home and network infrastructure providers.

SBTVD

The Fórum do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre s the Brazilian organisation and edits the Ginga specifications widely spread in Latin America. Ginga-NCL integrates a web component and some liaison should be considered at some point.

SMPTE

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is an international professional association, based in the United States of America, of engineers working in the motion imaging industries. An internationally recognized standards organizations, SMPTE has over 400 standards, Recommended Practices and Engineering Guidelines for television production, film making, digital cinema, audio recording and medical imaging.

(This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but illustrative of groups working on related technologies.)

Participation

Participation is open to W3C Members and invited experts.

In order to make rapid progress, the group MAY form several Task Forces (TFs), each working on a separate topic. Group members are free to join any number of TFs.

Participants are reminded of the Good Standing requirements of the W3C Process.

Communication

This group primarily conducts its technical work on the public mailing list at public-web-and-tv@w3.org (archive). See W3C mailing list and archive usage guidelines. There is also a member-only list to be used for administrative or member-confidential purposes at member-web-and-tv@w3.org (archive).

Information about the group (documents under review, face-to-face meetings, etc.) is available from the Web and TV Interest Group home page and on the group wiki.

Decision Policy

The group will aim to proceed by consensus.

Where there is consensus among the representatives of W3C members in the group, it will be forwarded as a consensus position. Where the group does not reach agreement, the different positions (whether held by W3C members or other members of the group) will be considered together.

All technical resolutions made by a meeting of the group are provisional until two weeks after being published to the mailing list. An objection made on the mailing list within two weeks of publishing a decision has the same standing as if it were made at the meeting.

Patent Disclosures

The Web and TV Interest Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Interest Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Interest Group does not produce recommendation-track documents, when Interest Group participants review or propose work for recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 6.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

This document is the second charter for the Web and TV Interest Group. The previous charter can be found here: http://www.w3.org/2010/09/webTVIGcharter.html