Broadband Content Delivery Forum Founded

A new industry alliance, the Broadband Content Delivery Forum (www.bcdforum.org), unveiled plans April 4 to draw up recommended open architectures for delivering rich multimedia content over emerging broadband networks. The more than 30 charter members will develop a range of architectural specifications for building networks that can recognize an individual user and connect him with specific broadband content.

Broadband service providers AT&T Corp. (www.att.com), British Telecom plc (www.bt.com), DSL Networks Inc. (www.dslnetworks.com), Enron Corp. (www.enron.com), Telstra (www.telstra.com) and Zyan Communications Inc. (www.zyan.com) are among the first to join the BCDF.

The more than 30 charter BCDF members include service providers; content providers --- such as NBC Corp. subsidiary NBC Internet (www.nbci.com) and British Broadcasting Corp. (www.bbc.co.uk) --- media distribution companies, such as Akamai Corp. (www.akamai.com); and Internet infrastructure companies, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (www.hp.com), Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com) and Nortel Networks Corp. (www.nortelnetworks.com), the last of which guided formation of the forum.

With its first quarterly meeting scheduled for May 25 in Orlando, Fla., the forum intends to cooperatively develop specifications that will address issues such as:

· Enabling "personal portals" through which subscribers identify themselves to broadband networks;

· Personalized service 'advertisements' through which a service lets its existence be known to users;

· World Wide Web-based service selection processes;

· "Personal content tunnels" to direct a user to requested content;

· Per-user quality of service controls; and

· An accounting and billing architecture for personalized content delivery.

"Through partnerships with Akamai, DSL carrier Telocity Inc. (www.telocity.com) and others, we've been assembling a broadband content infrastructure ourselves," said Benjamin Feinman, vice president and general manager of broadband business for NBCi. "This forum gives us a great opportunity not only to create more broadband content, but to help move the entire industry forward."

NBC anticipates that, in the "always on" broadband access world, subscribers will be willing to pay for personal finance services, multimedia shopping, two-way multimedia communities; downloaded software, voice communications and media on demand. With the new broadband medium, "we can also turn NBC viewers into users and buyers," he said.

Anthony Alles, president of Nortel's Shasta IP services division and interim BCDF chairman, extended an open invitation to all interested parties to join the forum. "The network has to know who you are to give you what you want," Alles said. "Service providers and content owners, not just vendors selling technology, are coming together in this forum to forge networks that can do this."

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