Interactive Television Platforms and Development Tools

By Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

The digital television marketplace is currently dominated by simple digital STBs, also known as integrated receivers/decoders (IRDs) that run each manufacturer’s real time operating system. IRDs market dominance is followed by a few competing, incompatible, and proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs). In an industry that is driven by sheer volume, application developers have to either develop the same application for multiple APIs or license a higher level middleware that supports the target platforms. There are also a few independent organizations that define standards for ITV application development, like the TV-Anytime forum, although member organizations are not obligated to conform. Despite the many alternative choices, researchers and engineers with an information technology background will find more flexibility and familiarity with the Microsoft TV (MSTV) platform, the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) and Linux that we review next.

Multimedia Home Platform

MHP is the most widely accepted standard for interactive television applications. Apart from Microsoft, all other technology providers --even those with competitive platforms like OpenTV-- are either giving the choice for MHP application development or developing their own MHP-compliant implementations. Nevertheless, there is a minimal installed base of MHP set-top boxes, while early commercial implementations are lacking major features (like digital video recording, which has been available by TiVo for a long time), are having very slow response times and are not very stable. Moreover, MHP authoring environments are very few, and are always expensive, without realistic options for academic or research pricing.

The above problems are natural for a new technology, but MHP is also facing regulatory problems in the European Union (EU) marketplace. Despite heavy support by many companies and groups, MHP’s reliance on Java has not allowed it to be pushed by the EU’s regulatory body as the continent’s standard for interactive television applications. The European Commission issued a public consultation and public hearing on a report on remaining barriers to the achievement of widespread access to new services and applications of the Information Society through open platforms in digital television and 3G mobile communications. Numerous companies and organizations have responded and have presented diverse views on this subject. As long as MHP is tied to a programming language/environment that is controlled by a company (SUN), the MHP cannot be pushed by the EU as a standard. MHP is now being designed to be operating system and programming language agnostic, although some reliance on the Java platform is still evident.

In conclusion, an inherent advantage of the MHP is that it has been built from the ground-up as an extension of the commercially successful Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard and is also supported by the respective research community and the manufacturers of broadcasting equipment. From this side, MHP seems to be a natural extension of the DVB and most STB manufacturers are now deploying MHP compatible boxes.

Microsoft Television Platform The MSTV platform is a new entrant in the interactive television market for application development, but it already offers a number of advantages. Most importantly, the core components of MSTV are available in the Windows XP operating system and can be run on affordable personal computers. In addition to the pervasive availability of a television API, through the windows platform, MSTV can be utilized within a familiar and mature integrated development environment. Microsoft Visual Studio offers a multitude of tools for designing, developing, testing and deploying an application. Application developers using the .NET edition of Visual Studio may program with the Visual Basic language, although the use of the C# language will not have made any difference at all, since the .NET framework assumes a common language runtime for all builds.

In contrast to MSTV, other proprietary implementations (like Liberate, Canal+ Mediahighway, OpenTV) require the respective authoring environments that consist of idiosyncratic and expensive IDE and STB technologies. Against the use of MSTV is the fact that Microsoft has a very limited installed base of STBs compared to competitive implementations. An application developer aiming for marketplace success and revenue streams would normally target for the most popular platform, which is currently OpenTV, followed by Mediahighway. In our opinion, MSTV stands as the most familiar, inexpensive and readily available platform, provided that there is no requirement for commercialization. In conclusion, the MSTV platform offers unified control for broadcast and local television content and coupled with the Visual Studio IDE allows the future migration of an application to STBs.

Interactive Television Development with Linux

Linux and ITV development has been a perfect match since the introduction of the Linux-based TiVo, although the end-product is still closed to further development –unless hacking is used. More recently, the dream-box introduced a linux-based STB that is open to development. Unfortunately, most Linux developers have been implementing alternative TiVo-like systems, without employing any ITV standard. Yet, the source code for most of the Linux ITV projects is usually open for everyone to improve and modify. For Linux developers, the most appropriate solution would be to use Java and employ the MHP API or employ one of the open-source projects like the linuxtv. In conclusion, Linux is more suitable for information technology experts and for designing STBs. Interactive television producers are likely to be more comfortable with visual authoring environments running on familiar desktop operating systems.

You can read the details of the implementation of a user interface programming toolkit in a paper from a special issue about ITV in the Computers and Graphics Journal: User Interface Development for Interactive Television.

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