NEM Activities

 

NEM Community

 

NEM Structure

 

NEM Regional

 

About NEM

Overview

The Networked and Electronic Media (NEM) Initiative is focused on an innovative mix of various media forms, delivered seamlessly over technologically transparent networks, to improve the quality, enjoyment and value of life. NEM represents the convergence of existing and new technologies, including broadband, mobile and new media across all ICT sectors, to create a new and exciting era of advanced personalised services. The NEM is an industry-led Initiative to promote and direct the large-scale initiative needed to accelerate the pace of innovation and rate of technology evolution to the level that will place European Industry at the forefront of the technology and give users an incredible choice of services. All these efforts will bear in mind the evolutionary framework from home and office environments towards broadband extended home and office environments.

Members of the NEM Initiative come from various industry sectors as well as research and regulatory institutions: Academia, Technology centres, Broadcasters, Consumer and professional equipment manufacturers, Regulatory and policy makers, Service providers, and Telecom operators. They are all involved in work of the Initiative through NEM organisational bodies and working groups.
See NEM structure

Outline of the NEM platform

The NEM Technology Platform should be a technological undertaking in the broadest sense including: road mapping, common experimental platforms, experimentation of business models, and feedback on customer experience and technology adoption by consumers. Technology Platform projects should "tile" the R&D needs of the NEM sector (each project covering an area complementary to other projects).

One key objective is to build a pan-European NEM infrastructure as a sustainable technology carrier allowing integration of projects results, as a permanent evaluation facility, to test and validate service models, and as a vehicle for international cooperation. Furthermore, the NEM Technology Platform stimulates worldwide development of regulations and standardisation policies and promotes and develops international cooperation.

As result of its recent activities, the NEM Initiative has released the following main documents:

Further documents issued by the NEM Initiative can be found here.

The following challenges can be outlined as imminent issues addressed by the NEM Initiative:

  • Technological: Mastering the full range of communications and networking technologies, enabling new converged electronic media markets to develop in the context of home networks, residential platforms, and extended home environments.
  • Business: Establishing the conditions which favour open business models, enable competition and safeguard consumer choice while ensuring a significant depth of interoperability at as many layers of the value chain as possible (content, service, aggregation, software, network, device providers, and vendors).
  • Societal/policy: Understanding how the range of new networked and electronic media technologies can impact the quality of life of the EU citizen and providing policy makers with options for coherent and effective policies. Development of new services and technologies to the Europeans should also bear in mind its implications on potential augmentation of the digital divide problem.
  • Regulatory:Understanding and influencing the development of the most appropriate regulatory framework in a sector characterised by a plethora of diverse content types, wide distribution means, new Digital Rights Management issues, technologically neutral spectrum usage issues, and consumer protection issues. Regulatory policies should be deeply aware on the new challenges faced by the convergent of services and applications using the same technological infrastructures. The traditional borders between fixed and mobile, wired and wireless, satellite and terrestrial are becoming unidentifiable.
  • Sustainability:The European efforts in the NEM R&D should bear in mind the overall context of the European strengths and weaknesses empowering the European leadership in the areas where Europe is today at the front of technology and stimulating reasonable efforts in all those other areas where Europe is behind other regions in the world. In addition, the European Union internal coordination has to be significantly enhanced through the fostering of coordination of priorities and goals of the National R&D programs; the setting up of Member States Mirror groups would contribute to a better integration of R&D efforts from the Europeans.
  • International co-operation:Fostering the establishment of cooperation agreements and joint R&D projects with non-EU partners with a view to influence the development of globally accepted standards and specifications.