Much of the television industry’s focus right now is on how to move content around – whether through multi-room DVR, TV Everywhere initiatives, or device-to-device transfers. However, there’s a corollary issue that’s also being explored: how to move user navigation features around to different devices. Let’s say you can access the content on your DVR from a mobile phone. Does that mean you can access and control the set-top’s user interface directly as well? Or do you need to jury-rig that part of the operation?
At SCTE last week, I started to hear more about the CEA standard, CEA-2014 (also referred to as just CE-2014). According to the CEA website, the standard “defines the necessary mechanisms to allow a user interface to be remotely displayed on and controlled by devices or control points other than the one hosting the logic.” However, I thought someone in the Cable-Tec Expo opening session defined it better in context. I believe it was Charter CTO Marwan Fawaz who described MoCA as the physical in-home network, DLNA as the networking standard that allows device discovery, and CE-2014 as the standard that moves navigation around to different devices.
So far no one has implemented CE-2014, and a quick survey of industry friends suggests there hasn’t been much movement in the last year. However, I heard the topic come up more than once at last week’s show. Perhaps it’s something to watch out for in 2010.
