Sharing

[ONEMANBANNED]

AMSTERDAM, Holland (Reuters) -- Seventeen of the largest computer, consumer electronics and mobile phone companies on Tuesday said they have agreed on common standards to make it easier for consumers to swap digital music and pictures at home.

Companies in the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG) include Hewlett-Packard, International Business Machines, Microsoft, Intel, Gateway, Nokia, Sony, Matsushita, Sharp, Samsung Electronics, Thomson and Philips.

"A seamless environment for sharing and growing new digital media and content services will make home networking transparent, so consumers can more easily create, manage, access and share digital content," the group said in a statement.

Products expected in 2004
The first products that are compatible with the new standard will be on the market by the second half of 2004, said Cesar Vorhringer, chief technology officer at Philips's consumer electronics unit, Europe's largest consumer electronics group.

"The timetable is aggressive," he said, adding that any other company was welcome to join the group.

He said there were too many, sometimes conflicting, standards that prohibited consumers from easily sending pictures from a digital camera to a television set, or music from a computer to a digital HiFi set.

Supporting open standards
The working group had already agreed to make certain technologies de facto standards. WiFi, for instance, will be set as a wireless standard for the physical network, while other technologies have been selected for network protocols, device control and digital formats.

All companies supporting the initiative would support these open standards in their products, alongside their own proprietary technologies if they wish, he said.

One element they have not yet agreed upon is how to set standards for digital rights management (DRM), which is aimed at protecting copyrighted media, such as music and films.

Setting basic rules
"We're going to be busy establishing that framework. We have to set the basic rules and tools to deal with that," Vorhringer said.

The fact that DRM issues still needed to be sorted out would not mean a slowdown of the rest of the standardization process, because most homes own a lot of digital content that is free from copyright, such as home videos and pictures, he added.

"A large part of content is 'in the clear', and we'll have to make sure our devices interoperate for that content," he said.