DAVIC: striving to achieve the benefits of openness

The convergence of computing, communications and consumer electronics brings enormous opportunity for industrial growth, for efficiency generally in the management of complexity, and for creativity in social and entertainment pursuits. It also beings confusion, uncertainty and ambiguity, which can be debilitating for users and expensive in waste and in the churn of obsolescent products. The Digital Audio-Visual Council (DAVIC) is one of few global and cross-industrial organisations which is succeeding in managing convergence. DAVIC is about to publish the second (backwards compatible) revision to its Specifications, DAVIC 1.2. The Specifications were created to reduce uncertainty, to reduce the costs of technology and to support the interoperability of high-quality, real-time interactive multimedia services around the world