Agora, a common vision of Home Network solutions

As a founding member of Agora, Technicolor works together with 17 other companies to identify solutions that promote a common vision of Home Network solutions. Agora’s goal is to enable the development of an industrial framework that can support the accessibility of Home Network applications and services, with particular focus on integrated entertainment, telecommunications, utilities management, personal comfort and security as well as health.

Founded in 2010 and presided over by Technicolor’s Jean-Pierre Lacotte, Agora’s collective effort has recently culminated in an advanced experimental panel that demonstrates five Home Network scenarios that function seamlessly thanks to “domo-compatible” applications.  Through this panel, products and services developed by different manufacturers “speak” the same language and thereby bring a new level of communication to the networked home.

The companies working on Agora believe that a Home Network should interconnect all home appliances, offering consumers new and innovative services.  This type of Home Network capitalizes on the common language of internet protocol making it easier for the products and services in a home to communicate.  The types of products and services that can work through an Agora panel included such areas as:

• Information and Communication: All the products and services in the home speak the same language, including phones, tablets, computers and the control panel.
• Multimedia and Digital entertainment: TV, music, Video on Demand, online games.
• Management and optimization of the global home energy system: gas, water, electricity.
• Home health services: easily adjusted comfort levels and the home.
• Safety and security of property and persons: a more secure home.

In order for this type of Home Network to be effective and successful, it must be easy for the end-user to install and take advantage of all these home networking services.  This new, advanced Home Network creates new possibilities in the evolution of the more efficient and economic networked home.

The Agora experimental Home Network panel is now at the engineering school in Paris (ECE) where students will have the opportunity to perform tests and imagine new domo-compatible solutions.