by Anton Shilov
03/14/2008 | 10:07 PM
At the 41st DVD Forum Steering Committee meeting several decisions were made with the most significant one being declaration of intention to include Internet connectivity into DVD players and communicate with “other organization” regarding recommendations.
The DVD steering committee approved the scope of the so-called Workgroup-12 (WG-12) on the meeting held in Tokyo, Japan, on the 27th of February, 2008. The WG-12 will “study and specify network applications and related network specification of DVD Forum formats, make recommendations for better interoperability and functionality of network connected DVD Forum specified devices and content. Besides, the WG-12 will “communicate on relevant recommendations with other standard creation organizations”.
Conventional DVDs do not feature any interactive technologies, whereas players cannot connect to the Internet in order to download additional content. Both interactive capabilities and Internet connectivity are available in HD DVD specification as well as Blu-ray disc profile 2.0. Given that it is not hard for content providers to enable Web-downloadable content for DVD, the DVD Forum plans to study whether this feature is relevant at all.
Given that without Toshiba HD DVD format is likely to vanish into oblivion, DVD Forum has to work with the Blu-ray disc association (BDA) to ensure that Web-based technologies were similar on both BD and DVD.
Some observers also pointed out that Toshiba-led DVD Forum may also explore video-on-demand Web-enabled technologies.