Augmenting Digital TV Receivers with REST APIs

Digital TV (DTV) receivers are flexible products that may be enhanced with features that exploit their basic resources: audio, video, and general media decoding, manipulation, and presentation. However, a new communication infrastructure is usually needed for that, which can even be accessed by a peripheral device, such as a smartphone, in order to provide configuration and control. Consequently, it is necessary to develop and test this entire communication chain, and, sometimes, at the end of this process, developers may even come to the conclusion that some tools are missing or such a link is so specific that a slightly different feature or modification should result in a different infrastructure. We advocate that representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs) constitute the ultimate choice for this kind of scenario as they provide starting points for more complex communication, present stateless behavior, and are mature and reliable. As a result, we have devised a methodology, based on a RESTful server, to be integrated into commercial DTV platforms, which is able to create new features in receivers. A real implementation of that was carried out, focused on digital signage capabilities. Its evaluation showed that such an approach is feasible and can provide a way to augment commercial DTV receivers without complex modifications, new devices, or additional software modules.