Cable Television Laboratories has announced the completion of the first of a set of specifications to create a common approach to handling descriptive data associated with on-demand video events.

Termed Metadata, the specifications come in different forms such as data that identifies a title of a VoD event or movie, and how a movie or event may be licensed and displayed. However, there is no agreement concerning a common approach to handle metadata, according to a company release.

VoD operating costs could be reduced and content encoding costs could be lowered using the specfications. It will also be easier to integrate VoD metadata with programme navigational features, electronic programme guides, and bandwidth management services located at cable system headends.

Along with the release of CableLabs VoD Content Specification V1.0, CableLabs has formed a royalty-free Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) pool. Contributors to the specification include Time Warner Cable, N2 Broadband, DIVA, SeaChange, Concurrent Computer Corp., and nCUBE. Licensed implementers will have a copyright license to the issued specification as well as participation in the royalty-free IPR pool.

Work will continue on additional metadata specifications through 2002, for which Cablelabs will use the assistance of the cable, hardware vendor, and content provider communities, the release states.

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