Interactive TV application design convergence across formats and devices

Abstract

The diversity of Interactive Digital Television (iTV) platforms has generated a diversity of languages, middlewares, technologies and authoring tools that do not facilitate the maintenance of the services across the exiting iTV devices and the business-tobusiness interchange (B2B). This paper presents a new architecture to unify the design of interactive TV (iTV) services across the multiple existing formats and devices. The proposed architecture is based on the DVB-PCF (Digital Video Broadcasting -Portable Content Format) standard. It enables the platform-independent iTV service description through the specification of the viewer's experience rather than its detailed implementation. This feature makes DVB-PCF a suitable format to be transcoded into any specific target platform format. However, this standard does not specify the scalability techniques to be used when mapping coordinates from the reference screen to the device display in cases where the resolutions differ. In this work we manage different service layouts through the automatic scaling of PCF documents and a later layout revision with the PCF Authoring tool. Furthermore, we present a PCF viewer tool to visualize and validate the generated and imported PCF services. Finally, as an example, we show the usage of a transcoder of PCF descriptions into a Web-based format. It allows the generation of the iTV applications optimized for a specific target platform.