RVU Alliance

Last updated
RVU Alliance
RVU Alliance logo.png
Established August 2009 [1]
Type Standards body
Headquarters 3855 SW 153rd Drive,
Beaverton, Oregon, 97006,
United States
Region served
Worldwide
Membership
27 [2]
Website www.rvualliance.org

The RVU Alliance (RVUA) is a standards body created to manage the RVU protocol standard as used by manufacturers of consumer electronics to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network.

The RVU protocol is an Application Layer protocol, that combines the pre-existing Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standards and a new Remote User Interface (RUI) protocol, which works similar to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The RVU RUI protocol is intended to allow an RVU-enabled client, such as a TV, to receive a pixel-accurate display of the user interface available on an RVU server.

Consumer electronics Electronic equipment intended for everyday home use

Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic equipments intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications, and home-office activities. In British English, they are often called brown goods by producers and sellers, to distinguish them from "white goods" which are meant for housekeeping tasks, such as washing machines and refrigerators, although nowadays, these would be considered brown goods, some of these being connected to the Internet. In the 2010s, this distinction is not always present in large big box consumer electronics stores, such as Best Buy, which sell both entertainment, communication, and home office devices and kitchen appliances such as refrigerators.

Home network

A home network or home area network (HAN) is a type of computer network that facilitates communication among devices within the close vicinity of a home. Devices capable of participating in this network, for example, smart devices such as network printers and handheld mobile computers, often gain enhanced emergent capabilities through their ability to interact. These additional capabilities can be used to increase the quality of life inside the home in a variety of ways, such as automation of repetitive tasks, increased personal productivity, enhanced home security, and easier access to entertainment.

Contents

Overview

The RVU Alliance exists to further the adoption and acceptance of the RVU protocol, a communications protocol, built substantially upon the pre-existing Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standards. The RVU protocol is intended to solve the problems inherent in viewing live or recorded digital media remotely across a Home network. For example, an RVU compliant TV will be able to view music, photos & video from an RVU compliant media server. The RVU protocol specifically can deal with the passing of broadcast video coming from a Multichannel video programming distributor through a residential gateway or dedicated media server to other consumer electronic devices in the home. The RVU protocol includes a pixel-accurate Remote User Interface (RUI) technology that allows the media server to fully control the client user experience.

Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) was founded by a group of PC and consumer electronics companies in June 2003 to develop and promote a set of interoperability guidelines for sharing digital media among multimedia devices under the auspice of a certification standard. DLNA certified devices include smartphones, tablets, PCs, TV sets and storage servers; in a typical use case, a user sends videos, pictures or music from their smartphone or storage server through their home WLAN to a TV set or tablet for display.

Digital media

Digital media are any media that are encoded in machine-readable formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified and preserved on digital electronics devices.

A media server refers either to a dedicated computer appliance or to a specialized application software, ranging from an enterprise class machine providing video on demand, to, more commonly, a small personal computer or NAS for the home, dedicated for storing various digital media. This can also mean that these servers are specialized for media for streaming

Remote User Interface

The RUI concepts makes use of a server device which implements all content bitmaps and graphics functions for a number of remote client devices. In this way a server can be used to generate a user guide experience specific to a TV service providers “look and feel”, and send that experience to a client device. The client can then display this graphics data without the need for any proprietary software from that service provider. RVU technology enables a compliant client device to offer user interface interactions such as guide, trick play, and interactive applications all without the presence of a dedicated set-top box. RVU Server devices will be provided by television content providers such as satellite, cable and telco broadcasters. Client devices such as televisions, Blu-ray players and PCs need only be compliant with the requirements of the RVU Protocol to work with an RVU server.

Aims

The published aims of the RVU Alliance are to expand the use of the RVU Protocol to enable users to:

Participating companies

There are 4 founding members: Broadcom, Cisco Systems, DIRECTV, and Samsung Electronics. [2]

Cisco Systems American multinational technology company

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in San Jose, California, in the center of Silicon Valley. Cisco develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, WebEx, Jabber and Jasper, Cisco specializes into specific tech markets, such as Internet of Things (IoT), domain security and energy management.

Samsung Electronics South Korean multinational electronics company

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a South Korean multinational electronics company headquartered in Suwon, South Korea. Due to some circular ownership, it is the flagship company of the Samsung chaebol, accounting for 70% of the group's revenue in 2012. Samsung Electronics has assembly plants and sales networks in 80 countries and employs around 308,745 people. It is the world's largest manufacturer of consumer electronics and semiconductors by revenue. As of June 2018, Samsung Electronics' market cap stood at US$325.9 billion.

As of June 2013, there are:

The RVUA is run by a board of directors consisting of the RVUA President and representatives from the founding members.

The board of directors oversees the activity of the following Working Groups:

History

RVUA was formed in August 2009 as the RVU Alliance.

Specification

The RVU protocol specification V1.0 is currently ratified by the board and available to members for implementation. The RVU protocol specification V2.0 became available on January 7, 2013. [3]

Any product with a network interface (e.g. MoCA, Ethernet, WiFi or otherwise) can become an RVU-connected device by installing RVU compatible software.

The specification is in large part dependent on the DLNA specification.

The specification uses DTCP/IP as "link protection" for copyright-protected commercial content between one device and another. [4]

Certification

The RVUA certification program went live in June 2011. Certification will involve Conformance Testing and Interoperability Testing of RVU-compatible devices. Once certified, a product is granted a license to use the RVU logo.

Products supporting RVU

The first RVU-compatible consumer products were released at the end of 2011. See www.rvualliance.org/products for more details.

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A digital media player (DMP) is a home entertainment consumer electronics device that can connect to a home network to stream digital media such as music, photos or digital video. Digital media players can stream files from a personal computer, network-attached storage or another networked media server, to play the media on a television or video projector display for home cinema. Most digital media players utilize a 10-foot user interface, and many are navigated via a remote control. Some digital media players also have smart TV features, such as allowing users to stream media such as digital versions of movies and TV shows from the Internet or streaming services.

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References

  1. ↑ RVU Alliance History
  2. 1 2 3 4 RVU Alliance Members
  3. ↑ Next Generation RVU Specification Is Now Available
  4. ↑ http://www.dlna.org/about_us/roadmap/DLNA_Whitepaper.pdf page 4, Table 1
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