MHEG Future

Several companies and research institutes are currently developing MHEG tools and applications and conducting interoperability experiments for international projects and consortia. The MHEG Support Center is a European project that hopes to implement and operate an MHEG support and conformance testing environment for developers of multimedia systems and applications. Its partners include CCETT, Cril Ingenierie (France), De teBerkom, and GMD Fokus (Germany). IPA, the Information-technology Promotion Agency of Japan, is developing an MHEG-5 system with an authoring tool and viewer. The project members consist of ASCII, KDD, NEC, NTT Soft-ware, the Oki Electric Industry, Pioneer, Sony, and Toppan Printing. The purpose of this project is to do a profiling study and conduct interoperability testing of MHEG-5 systems.

Also, the following European achievements are worth mentioning:

• a Java implementation of an MHEG-5 engine, available from Philips; (See below)
• MhegDitor by CCETT, an authoring tool based on Macromedia Director; and
• the results of the Jupiter project that addresses usability, performance, and interoperability of Davic-compliant services.

At CSELT, a partner of Jupiter, we're making more complete versions of MediaTouch and Armi-da. We've demonstrated these systems at a number of events on behalf of Telecom Italia and showed such applications as movies-on-demand, news-on-demand, tourist information, and interactive TV.

A list containing the above applications and other initiatives is maintained by the MHEG Users Group (MUG), an unofficial forum begun by people from the standardization body to dissemi-nate information and enable discussion on MHEG (see http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ovma/mug).

It's evident that the initial interest in MHEG-1 and MHEG-3 has recently decreased due to the incoming ITV/VoD profile, which is based on MHEG-5 and MHEG-6. The specification of this complete solution, urged and endorsed by Davic, was finalized by April 1998 when MHEG-6 is scheduled to become an International Standard. Further efforts will be devoted to MHEG-7, which is expected to provide the final specification of conformance and interoperability aspects for MHEG-5 by January 1999.