Eight companies that got together to develop a home network specification for audio visual appliances plan to start licensing their architecture in Spring next year. Royal Philips Electronics will handle the licensing program, which is aimed at companies in the electronics and multimedia business. Licensees for HAVi (Home Audio/Visual interoperability) will be able to develop HAVi compliant digital appliances that can be networked through the IEEE-1394 digital interface. This will enable digital multimedia content to be distributed throughout the home to appliances on the network. Havi compliant software, written in Java, is consumer electronics middleware, capable of ‘finding’ other devices on the network. Philips says software developers can create interactive Java-based applications and user interfaces. But the software is limited and an IP protocol stack is considered too complex for the typical HAVi device to support. But according to the HAVi web site, once the Internet Engineering Task Force has completed the specification of how IP data can be carried directly over IEEE-1394, HAVi will deal with these streams via the Stream Manager. Apart from Philips, the companies behind the project are Grundig AG, Hitachi Ltd, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, Sharp Corp, Sony Corp, Thomson Multimedia and Toshiba Corp. HAVi is a long way from the concept of the fully wired home and is restricted to devices such as set-top boxes, digital VCRs and hi-fi equipment. However, Philips is also involved with Microsoft Corp on the Home Radio Frequency Working Group, which aims to establish an open industry specification for communication between PCs and consumer electronic devices in the home. A Philips official said that a bridge between Havi devices and the wireless home network was possible in the future.
