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H2H and all that

Forget B2B, P2P, SOHO, H2O, even H2G2

by David Bradley

We'll all soon be watching what we want, when we want on our TVs and mobile devices, thanks to an EU technology program. Building on the communication technologies developed and improved in recent years, "Share it!" has developed an end-to-end system that provides seamless access to on-line, broadcast and personally stored content. It allows easy access and transfer of the content between local storage devices using home-to-home (h2h) networks.

"The partners in the ‘Share it!’ project set a very ambitious goal”, says Simon Parnall Chairman of the TV-Anytime Forum. “And together we have succeeded in combining state-of-the-art personal video recording, interactive television and broadband internet access to create new features for the European consumer. Most importantly, it has been achieved in a manner that is simple for them to use and understand.”

The major issues in enabling home-to-home sharing are rights management and interoperability. So it was vital that the project developed a system that was able to read content in all forms. The ‘Share it!’ platform makes extensive use of the 'TV Anytime' standard (ETSI standard TS 102 822) for storing information about local content, for searching over the peer-to-peer network and for building an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide). Several extended MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) applications were written to make use of this platform by the different project consortium members.

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