CEA Adopts DENi (TM) Standard

[Gregg Lengling]

CEA-2008 Establishes Standard Approach for Sharing Content Over a Home Network

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Arlington, Virginia 7/30/2003

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced today that its Home Network Committee (R7) has adopted a new standard for home networks, designated CEA-2008 -The Digital Entertainment Network Initiative DENi (TM). The standard was created to make it easier for consumers to share content over a home network and to establish consistent interoperability between consumer electronics end devices. The standard collects existing standards and specifies how they work together.
"The DENi standard represents a generational leap forward for home audio and video products," said John Gildred, vice president of engineering for Pioneer Research Center USA Inc. and chairman of CEA's R7.6 subcommittee that developed the standard. "With DENi, consumers will be able to choose compatible home networking products from different CE manufacturers and literally plug-and-play them together with no user setup required. Now that we have agreed on how to do audio/video networking, we can start building products which share content with other vendors' products over the network."

"This is a precedent for CEA as it demonstrates the viability of a new standard development model," said Virginia Williams, director of engineering for CEA. "The broad support behind CEA-2008, and our collaboration with the DENi consortia, resulted in increased industry interest and rapid adoption of the standard. We're pleased with the flexibility and ease-of-use that the DENi standard will help deliver to consumers and their home networks."

CEA-2008 leverages widely-used open Internet and CE industry standards. By clarifying how more than 60 different standards interrelate, DENi makes interoperability between different manufacturers' audio, video and imaging products possible. This compatibility is achieved using Internet Protocols (IP), with Ethernet as the common network platform, UPnP(tm) as the middleware, and a core set of supported audio and video formats. In addition, DENi supports a quality of service scheme for Ethernet that was developed in CEA's R7.5 A/V Networking subcommittee to allow for better interoperability between devices that support bandwidth reservation and those that only support prioritization.

Upcoming plans for the DENi standard include an interoperability "plugfest" in August 2003, which allows manufacturers to evaluate their prototypes and product designs to ensure compatibility, and the rollout of an accompanying logo program for manufacturer self-certification, which will be handled by CEA's Home Networks and IT (HNIT) division.

CEA-2008 is available from Global Engineering Documents at http://global.ihs.com. Additional information about CEA's Technology and Standards department can be found at //www.ce.org/standards.