RE: webtv-Issue-20: TV Querying and Control

Hello Giuseppe,
 
I believe UPnP specs are RANDZ and companies can join the UPnP Forum (Basic membership) for no-cost.
 
It seems W3C could benefit from the 10+ years of experience UPnP accumulated while working to provide solutions for  CE ecosystem devices.
 
I dont see how setting "artificial" barriers to cooperation between the organizations will be beneficial?
 
Regards,
Russell Berkoff

________________________________

From: Giuseppe Pascale [mailto:giuseppep@opera.com]
Sent: Tue 6/14/2011 3:19 AM
To: public-web-and-tv@w3.org; Russell Berkoff; Matt Hammond
Subject: Re: webtv-Issue-20: TV Querying and Control



On Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:14:54 +0200, Matt Hammond 
<matt.hammond@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>> *    Standardisation could facilitate a new ecosystem of interfaces.
>> *    Existing standards for home network communication are not
>> available from the browser context
>>
>> Actually CEA-2014-B has a web-binding for UPnP devices.

But the question we are asking ourselves is: is it possible to cover this 
use case using open web standards?


>> PHP has a
>> binding for UPnP Devices (GUPnP). A desirable goal of this TF is to have
>> W3C also publish these (or similar bindings).
>
> The intention with this statement was to point to the current lack of 
> ability to access technologies (such as UPnP) *directly* from within, 
> for example, a browser running on an iPad, android device, or laptop. I 
> believe the interests of many in this TF is to plug precisely this gap 
> for the likes of UPnP.

The goal is either to see if there are suitable open standards to reuse or 
if we need to define something new, as needed.

And even though there are some existing standards we may want to support 
(e.g. UPnP) we should not restrict ourselves to this since there could be 
several reasons (technical, commercial etc) why one would want to 
implement the same use case using a different underlying technology. The 
question for the future WG would then be: can this be achieved with a 
common approach? This is up for discussion, and we had already a first 
brainstorming as captured by Clarke in ISSUE-9

http://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/HNTF/Home_Network_TF_Discussions/Alternatives

That is why I think, once again, we should keep our usecases generic 
enough.
Mentioning UPnP, Bonjour, Bluetooth etc is fine IFF 1)there is a 
justification for it (X% devices on the market already support this) 2)we 
don't restrict ourselves to that.

This taskforce is not a UPnP TF, so we are not doing a gap analysis of 
UPnP.

/g



--
Giuseppe Pascale
TV & Connected Devices
Opera Software - Sweden