Optimal carousel stream for interactive digital TV service

With the rapid growth of digital television technology, TV operators can now deliver applications for interactive services via television broadcasting system. DVB-MHP standard defines the delivery of interactive applications using DSM-CC object carousel for the purpose of periodical transmission. Since the transport stream carries multiple services, the bandwidth allocated for the applications becomes limited. As a result, the application delivery time and start-up time in the receivers could be painfully slow. This paper uses Markov chain model with the proposed multi-shot framework for MHP applications. Some modified literature approaches are combined to generate the optimal carousel stream, which repeats the shots in a way ensuring low starting time and low average delay time. The proposed optimal carousel stream generator is implemented on our DVB-MHP authoring tool. The experiment demonstrates that the carousel streams delivered to the MHP set-top box can work considerably effectively.