The W3C is the new standards body for television remote user interfaces

TV middleware players are taking the direct lead in W3C technology instead of creating a governing body, which is ideal for a world that needs the Internet.

By Stephen Froehlich, Senior Analyst, IMS Research December 1, 2011

The SCTE Cable-tec expo last week was one of those wonderful, well-attended, but quiet shows where there were few surprises and a ton of real work being done to actually deploy disruptive technologies, including TV gateways and thin clients, multiscreen TV, and some amazing developments in the world of new cable modem front ends and new CMTS and Edge QAM architectures.

One thing that was new at the show was how quickly all of the major players in TV middleware are moving to HTML-5. OpenTV (Kuldeski) was already well on the path to HTML-5, but NDS was showing a version of its advanced Snowflake UI that had been ported from Flash to HTML-5. EchoStar and SeaChange also had HTML-5 based interfaces on display. The progress was impressive enough that I am thinking of advancing my forecast for HTML-5 remote UI from 2015 to 2013-2014.

What really caught my attention, though, is that nobody is trying to form some separate standards body to govern HTML-5-for-TV. Instead, the major players have increased their participation in the W3C directly, making that body the standards body for TV remote user interface. If I stop and think about it for a second or two, this is exactly as it should be in an increasingly web-converged world.