Interactive TV Standards

For any digital TV developer or manager, the maze of standards and specifications related to MHP and OCAP is daunting-you have to patch together pieces from several standards to gather all the necessary knowledge you need to compete worldwide. The standards themselves can be confusing, and contain many inconsistencies and missing pieces. Interactive TV Standards provides a guide for actually deploying these technologies for a broadcaster or product and application developer. Understanding what the APIs do is essential for your job, but understanding how the APIs work and how they relate to each other at a deeper level helps you do it better, faster and easier. Learn how to spot when something that looks like a good solution to a problem really isn't. Understand how the many standards that make up MHP fit together, and implement them effectively and quickly. Two DVB insiders teach you which elements of the standards that are needed for digital TV, highlight those elements that are not needed, and explain the special requirements that MHP places on implementations of these standards.Once you've mastered the basics, you will learn how to develop products for US, European, and Asian markets--saving time and money. By detailing how a team can develop products for both the OCAP and MHP markets, Interactive TV Standards teaches you how to to leverage your experience with one of these standards into the skills and knowledge needed to work with the critical, related standards.Does the team developing a receiver have all the knowledge they need to succeed, or have they missed important information in an apparently unrelated standard? Does an application developer really know how to write a reliable piece of software that runs on any MHP or OCAP receiver? Does the broadcaster understand the business and technical issues well enough to deploy MHP successfully, or will their project fail? Increase your chances of success the first time with Interactive TV Standards.

Autorentext

Steven Morris is an experienced developer in the area of interactive digital television. Formerly of Philips Electronics, one of the major players in the development of MHP, he was heavily involved in the development of the standard, its predecessors, and related standards such as JavaTV. In addition to work on the standard itself, Steven has experience developing MHP middleware and applications and is the Webmaster and content author for the 'Interactive TV Web' website (www.interactivetvweb.org and www.mhp-interactive.org), a key resource for MHP, JavaTV and OCAP developers.
Anthony Smith-Chaigneau is the former Head of Marketing & Communications for the DVB Consortium. In that role, he created the first MHP website www.mhp.org and was responsible for driving the market implementation of this specification. Anthony left the DVB to join Advanced Digital Broadcast, where he helped them bring the first commercial MHP receivers to market. He is still heavily involved in the DVB MHP committees with Osmosys, an MHP and OCAP licensing company, based out of Switzerland.

Inhalt

Preface
Intended audience
How this book is organized
Versions

Chapter 1 - The middleware market
Why do we need open standards?
Driving forces behind open standard middleware
Correcting the fragmented iTV market
What are DVB and CableLabs?
The Digital Video Broadcasting Project
CableLabs
A history lesson - the background of MHP and OCAP
The MHP family tree
JavaTV, a common standard for digital TV
Harmonization - Globally Executable MHP
The hard part of standardization
Intellectual property and royalties
Where do we go from here?
Open vs. proprietary middleware

Chapter 2 - A brief introduction to digital TV
The consumer perspective
Customizable TV
Understanding digital TV services
Producing digital TV content
Elementary streams
Transport streams
The multiplexing process
Carrying transport streams in the network
Energy dispersal
Error correction
Modulation
Cable vs. satellite vs. terrestrial broadcasting
Broadcasting issues and business opportunities
Subscriber management and scrambling
The Subscriber Management System
The return channel - technical and commercial considerations

Chapter 3 - Middleware architecture
MHP and OCAP are not Java
They're not the web either
Working in the broadcast world
The anatomy of an MHP/OCAP receiver
The navigator
Differences in OCAP
A new navigator - the monitor application
Modules in the execution engine
Architectural issues for implementers
Choosing a Java VM
Sun's JVM or a clean-room implementation?
The impact of the Java Community Process
Portability
Performance issues

Chapter 4 - Applications and application management
An introduction to Xlets
Xlet contexts
Writing your first Xlet
Do's and don'ts for application developers
Application signaling
Extending the AIT
Controlling Xlets
Registering unbound applications
Making applications coexist reliably
Pitfalls for middleware developers

Chapter 5 - The JavaTV service model
What happens during service selection?
Abstract services
Managing abstract services in OCAP
Registering applications
Selecting abstract services

Chapter 6 - Resource management issues
Introducing the resource notification API
Using the resource notification API
Handling resource contention
Resource management in OCAP
Resource contention before version I12
Resource contention in later versions
Common features of resource contention handling
An example
Resource management strategies in OCAP
Merging OCAP and MHP resource management

Chapter 7 - Graphics APIs
The display model in a digital TV receiver
HScreens and HScreenDevices
Configuring screen devices
Screen devices and resource management
A practical example of device configuration

HScenes and HSceneTemplates
Creating an HScene
Developing applications using HScenes
The HAVi widget set
Changing the look of your application
HLooks in practice
The behavior of components in MHP and OCAP
Interacting with components
Co-ordinate schemes
Integrating graphics and video
Transparency
Mattes and alpha compositing
Images
Text presentation
Multilingual support
Using fonts
Handling user input
Keyboard events and input focus
Exclusive access to keyboard events
Practical issues for digital TV graphics

Chapter 8 - Basic MPEG concepts in MHP and OCAP
Content referencing in the MHP and OCAP APIs
Locators for DVB streaming content
Locators for streaming content in OCAP systems
Locators for files
Locators for video 'drips'
Locator classes
Creating a locator
Network-bound locators

Chapter 9 - Reading service information
Service information and other system components
Why do we need two SI APIs?
Caching strategies
In-band vs. out-of-band service information
The DVB service information API
The SI database
Making an SI request
Getting the results of a query
SI Events
An example
Monitoring service information
Low-level access to SI data
Using the JavaTV service information API
Basic concepts
Handling the results from an SI query
The core SI API
Access to transport information
Access to information about services
Access to information about events
Monitoring service information
The OCAP SI extensions
System integration
Caching service information
Building the API implementations
Handling the event handlers
Performance issues

Chapter 10 - Section filtering
Hardware vs. software section filters
Using section filters
The section filtering API
…