Delivering interactive services to home using digital video broadcast infrastructure

Commercial deployments of digital TV provide a digital video broadcast (DVB) infrastructure. DVB is a large digital broadband network with data delivery capability and with digital terminals (set-top boxes) at the user premises. As such, it provides a powerful platform for delivery of additional information and data services that can not only enrich but fundamentally transform the television viewing experience. This paper provides an overview of an architecture for interactive service delivery to home via the DVB infrastructure in systems with and without the return channel. The presented approach relies on a novel broadcast model of computing which is ideally suited to the DVB infrastructure. This model works even with low-cost user terminals, such as the basic digital TV set-top boxes with limited computational and graphics capability and no local disk storage.