An extensible set-top-box architecture for interactive and broadcast services offering sophisticated user guidance

Currently available set-top-boxes (STBs) are mainly used for digital TV reception. The user interface (UI) and the UI dialog of such a device usually focus on its technological aspects and to a large degree ignore the needs of the user. The impact is that the user quite often is unsatisfied when interacting with the device. Recent UI design approaches (Lonczewski and Schreiber, 1996; Lonczewski, 1997) are proving that the focus should be put on the tasks that the user can perform with the STB rather than its underlying technical capabilities. However, modern design approaches both for the STB UI as well as its underlying system architecture can be incorporated into a complete system design with reasonable effort. This paper presents the architecture of the "d-box", the STB being used for broadcasting TV services as well as future interactive services like Internet, home-shopping etc. in Germany. The layered software architecture employs a Java Virtual Machine offering a high degree of independency of its underlying hardware. Emphasis is put upon the user-friendliness of the device by providing a uniform UI both for experts and novices, therefore allowing intuitive and easy access for different user groups.