TM Forum and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at USC in Hollywood have partnered in an attempt to eliminate the barriers to new distribution revenue for content and communication services providers.
The groups will bring together the entertainment, consumer electronics, technology, and services industries to collaborate on opportunities for new consumer entertainment offerings today and into the future. Together with mutual member companies including Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and TCS, the new partnership will significantly enhance the dialog and collaboration between content owners, media industry suppliers, and communications service providers. Initial joint projects plan to address content metadata and identification schemes to advance interoperability across digital distribution value chains.
Over the next three months, the two organizations plan to create a roadmap that spells out the specific deliverables, milestones and actions needed to achieve the shared goal of enabling seamless and profitable Digital Media services. This will include looking at digital video distribution value chains model issues, standards gaps, and solution trends in the current content metadata landscape, particularly in identification and descriptive areas and the monetization and profitability implications to both content owners and service providers.
