An Authoring Tool and Extendable Production Architecture for Interactive Television Services

Interactive TV program is made possible by digital television standards. MHP, Multimedia Home Platform, is an open standard from DVB for creating interactive content application. MHP provides a rich set of application programming interface for designer to create various kinds of services by direct Java programming. In this paper, we will describe an innovative authoring tool for enhancing interactive TV service creation environments. A layered scene-and-shot model has been created to represent the interactive services content relationship and store in XML form. Individual object is mapped to the HAVi user interface component and associated action so that it could response to the TV user's remote control action. With online Java code generation and compilation, the interactive service can be easily transformed into MHP Xlet application. This approach creates a flexible platform architecture that can be used to add new features, such as digital rights management and personal video recording, to the broadcast service.