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.

* A practical, real-world introduction to the technical elements of the OCAP and MHP standards.
* Get everything you need without wading though thousands of pages of standards- many of which don't apply to digital TV!
* Get inside concrete problems that have been found by the authors and other users - issues not generally known outside of the standards committees.

Preface: Intended audience, How this book is organized, Versions; Chapter 1 - The middleware market; Chapter 2 - A brief introduction to digital TV; Chapter 3 - Middleware architecture; Chapter 4 - Applications and application management; Chapter 5 - The JavaTV service model; Chapter 6 - Resource management issues; Chapter 7 - Graphics APIs; Chapter 8 - Basic MPEG concepts in MHP and OCAP; Chapter 9 - Reading service information; Chapter 10 - Section filtering; Chapter 11 - Media Control; Chapter 12 - DSM-CC and broadcast filesystems; Chapter 13 - Security in MHP and OCAP; Chapter 14 - Communicating with other Xlets; Chapter 15 - Building applications with HTML; Chapter 16 - MHP 1.1; Chapter 17 - Advanced topics; Chapter 18 - Building a common middleware platform; Chapter 19 - Deploying MHP and OCAP; Appendix A - DVB service information; Appendix B - ATSC service information