Interactive TV Standards

 

This section aims to provide articles and links to organisations involved in interactive TV standards developments.

iTV production standards initiative http://www.itvstandards.org
The goal of this initiative is to increase the amount of iTV programming and make it more economical and efficient to produce and deploy interactive programming. The standards enable producers and studios to write interactive content once for distribution on all major set-top box and personal computer platforms. Production standards will create value for all companies with a stake in the industry:

ARIB - http://www.arib.or.jp

Association of Radio Industries and Businesses, Japan

ATVEF - http://www.atvef.com

The Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF) is a cross-industry alliance of companies representing the broadcast and cable networks, television transports, consumer electronics, and PC industries.This alliance of companies has defined protocols for Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)-based enhanced television, which allow content creators to deliver enhanced programming over all forms of transport (analog, digital, cable, and satellite) to any intelligent receivers.

ATSC - http://www.atsc.org

ATSC (The Advanced Television Systems Committee) is an international, non-profit membership organization developing voluntary standards for the entire spectrum of advanced television systems. Specifically, ATSC is working to coordinate television standards among different communications media focusing on digital television, interactive systems, and broadband multimedia communications. ATSC is also developing digital television implementation strategies and presenting educational seminars on the ATSC standards.

DVB-MHP - http://www.mhp.org

DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) was a work item, which the DVB started in 1997. Its aim was to standardize elements of the home platform that would be key to the success of interactive multimedia applications in the future. At the time, it was seen as a natural progression from the pure broadcast work of DVB into the interactive TV applications that are beginning to dominate the transition from analog to digital TV. The work covered not only the Application Programming Interface (API), but also issues such as the In-home Digital Network and the "local cluster".

ETSI - http://www.etsi.org

ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) is a not for profit organization whose mission is to produce the telecommunications standards that will be used for decades to come throughout Europe and beyond.

OCAP - http://www.opencable.com

The OpenCable initiative, managed by the Advanced Platforms and Services group at CableLabs, was begun in 1997 with a goal of helping the cable industry deploy interactive services over cable. Like several other CableLabs projects, including DOCSIS and PacketCable, OpenCable will provide a set of industry standards, which will help accomplish this goal via three key objectives to: 1) define the next-generation digital consumer device, 2) encourage supplier competition, and 3) create a retail hardware platform. As such, the OpenCable project has two key components: a hardware specification and a software specification. The hardware specification, which has been completed, allows a receiver that can be sold at retail to provide interoperability. The software specification of the OpenCable project, called the OpenCable Applications Platform (OCAP), solves the problem of proprietary operating system software by creating a common platform upon which interactive services may be deployed.

SCTE - http://www.scte.org

SCTE (The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers) is a non-profit professional organization providing training, certification and standards. Since 1969, SCTE has continually expanded its resources and services to meet the changing needs of its members in a rapidly evolving industry. It is the only cable telecommunications organization accredited by the American National Standards Institution (ANSI) to develop technical standards and provides a neutral forum for professionals to collaborate on standards that lead the way to global compatibility.

SMPTE - http://www.smpte.org

Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers

TV-Anytime Forum - http://www.tv-anytime.org/

The global TV-Anytime Forum is an association of organizations which seeks to develop specifications to enable audio-visual and other services based on mass-market high volume digital storage in consumer platforms - simply referred to as local storage.

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Last updated 30 April 2004