ABOUT THE VESA GROUP

VESA began in 1995 as an outgrowth from an effort to standardize functions within set-top boxes. The group issued a call for proposals and received several responses. The input received was evaluated, and allowed the VESA group to develop its standardized architecture and ultimately acted as a catalyst for the group to choose IEEE 1394 as the backbone in the home. This choice was controversial at the time but is since better understood and accepted in the home networking community. After the group agreed on the lower-level layers and media, they began to work on higher levels. The IP protocol was chosen as the internetworking layer because of its ubiquity and flexibility. Shortly thereafter, Web browsers and servers were chosen as the interface of choice. VESA has defined an architecture and a set of protocols that will enable this vision to be realized. The committee goals are:

• To provide an interoperability specification that will allow the transfer of information from any device to any other device in the home

• To allow interoperability between all home networks, regardless of their individual physical and data link technologies and bandwidth capabilities

• To provide a common interface on the home side for access devices, such as the residential gateway

• To provide a migration path from analog distribution to totally digital distribution

• To provide directory services for all networked devices in the home