Digital Broadcasting and Consumer Electronics Engineering for Interactive Television Systems

By Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

In addition to content design and media consumption behavior in the home, another discrete and important facet of interactive television research is engineering for broadcasting systems and consumer electronics. Information technology researchers and practitioners will find that broadcasting centers and set-top boxes are increasingly being driven by personal computer components, like hard-disks, Ethernet networking, and are running common operating systems, like Linux on TiVo. Yet, the requirements for interactive television products are very different from office equipment, in terms of operation, appearance, reliability, security, maintenance, and life-cycle span. In this article, I describe the challenges of engineering design for interactive television systems and present suggestions from the literature.

Authorities have been talking long before the necessary technology becomes available about a shift in the way TV programs are going to be delivered. Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the MIT Media Lab, said that: ‘TV benefits most from thinking of it in terms of bits. Once in the machine, there is no need to view them in the order they were sent,’ implying that some kind of new presentation logic --either user choice or from some other source-- could be applied on the stored TV content.

Then he goes on to forecast with accuracy the ability to time-shift programs: ‘All of a sudden TV becomes a random access medium, more like a book or newspaper, browsable and changeable, no longer dependent on the time or day, or time required for delivery.’ Digital TV transmission and set-top boxes with hard disks and advanced computer graphics have made this vision a reality and researchers have offered approaches that are appropriate for interactive television (Chorianopoulos et al. 2003b).

Traditional PC and Web engineers should take into account the novel to their current experience technicalities of developing for a digital broadcasting platform. The broadcasting model of computing encompasses a radical shift in the mentality of application development process and tools. Milenkovic (1998) highlights the differences with the client-server mentality, describes the concept of the object and data carousel and explains why the characteristics of the networking infrastructure are an important factor in the type of feasibly deployed applications. Therefore, strong knowledge of the broadcasting model of computing is an important asset for interactive television design.

Engineers should also justify the use of persistent local storage (i.e. hard disks), which currently makes inroads into a multitude of consumer electronics products (like DVDs, game consoles, PVRs). Digital local storage technology takes viewer control one big step further (Whitingham 2000) --from simple channel selection with the remote-- by offering the opportunity for non-linear local programming and content selection (Chorianopoulos and Spinellis 2002).

However, storing copyrighted content locally is against the interests of media owners (Bell and Gemmell 2002). For example, PVR pioneer ReplayTV was sued for allowing the users to upload on the Internet and share locally stored television content. TiVo has been smarter not to include advertising skipping features, although a simple hack can activate the controversial thirty second skipping. TiVo has also gained popularity because it is based on the open source Linux OS, which makes it easy to add new features to TiVo boxes. The struggle between technological innovation and content copyright is nowhere else more apparent than inside Sony. Sony groups' conflicting interests are reported to be slowing down the company as a whole.

Moreover, networking and transferring content between devices in the home poses a number of significant installation and maintainability issues (Spinellis 2002). Since most homes do not have pre-installed networking infrastructure --but they do have electricity, phone and television wiring-- it may take time and effort from the technology providers to create plug and play solutions for a wide variety of domestic configurations and existing installations. For this case, technology providers should offer migration paths like digital transformers that turn old analog equipment (Bell and Gemmell 2002) into network terminals, ready to receive content from digital media and IT equipment.

Issues like privacy, coordination between local storage and real-time broadcast, have been addressed and are resolved in the design of a system for personalized and interactive television advertising (Chorianopoulos 2003a).

The table bellow summarizes the factors that affect the design of interactive television systems from the perspective of technology

Design Factor	Description
TiVo content	Both stored and broadcasted programming should be available and complementary to each other (Whittingham 2001; Milenkovic 1998)
Networked Storage	Local storage and networking at the home is a favorite, but copyright holders are concerned (Bell and Gemmell 2002)
Digital transformers	Television sets and hi-fi equipment have a slow replace cycle, but can be attached into digital networks by using adapters (Bell and Gemmell 2002)
Maintainability	There are numerous opportunities for networking between diverse home appliances, which come at the cost of maintainability (Spinellis 2002)

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