An extensible digital television middleware architecture based on hardware abstraction layer

China is drafting the digital television (DTV) interactive standard itself, aiming to make it more suitable for the Chinese market. This work presents a modular layer-oriented and extensible middleware solution compatible with the future standards. Furthermore this paper discusses the concept of hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that is the base of upper software. A resource management model based on HAL is also given, which serves to guide upper applications competing for limited resources in the set-top box such as an embedded platform.