The OpenIPTV Forum (OIPF) has launched its attempt to batten down HTML5 for connected TVs by defining a subset of features geared towards video, also including related web technologies. The new release defines a common profile incorporating stable web technologies unlikely either to change or fade away anytime soon that are likely to be deployed in connected TV. The hope is that this will reduce costs, extend reach and speed up development for creators of apps and services in connected or hybrid TV. This follows OIPF’s increasing alignment with the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) Consortium, having contributed a substantial part of the HbbTV platform currently being widely deployed by broadcasters and DTT operators in Europe.
OIPF was formed in March 2007 as an IPTV standards body by AT&T, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens, Sony and Telecom Italia but has since focused increasingly on OTT and hybrid TV. It has sometimes struggled for visibility, keeping quite a low profile while contributing to major standards efforts, including HTTP Adaptive Streaming and particularly MPEG DASH, into which it helped incorporate MPEG2 transport as the basis of streaming.
Similarly OIPF is missing out on the credit for its contributions to HbbTV, including the DAE (Declarative Application Environment) sometimes referred to as the ‘OIPF browser’. DAE has been designed to enable developers to bridge the gap between the user interface in terms of screen size, layout and pointing devices for traditional PC browser usage and the emerging one for TV. The OIPF defines functions for control of on-demand media, remote control functions including key events and spatial IP and broadcast tuners, PVR management and others.
This work has been aligned with HTML5, with a clear decision to include only well proven mature components and leave out those more recently introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium. We find therefore CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and DOM3 Document Object Model Core Level 3 cited as core components, both of these having been around for 10 years.
CSS is a so called style sheet language for describing the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language such as HTML, primarily to separate content from presentation, although the distinction between the two is more blurred in the case of video. Then DOM3 is the interface through which apps can dynamically access and update the content, as well as its structure and style.