An Architecture for TV Receivers as Multimedia Gateways for Free-to-Air Content

Digital TV (DTV) receivers are important entertainment and information products, which usually present only one program at a time. However, such a condition is very limiting and, when people in the same domestic environment have different content preferences or are often in different parts of it, another device is usually acquired to fill in the gap, which leads to high costs. The present article addresses this problem and proposes a multi-tuner architecture that simultaneously presents two or more free-to-air DTV programs, using the same display or connected peripheral devices. A prototype implementing it, named Multiplex, was developed, which consists of a multi-tuner DTV receiver, also called DTV multimedia gateway, and a smartphone application. This realization provided interesting insights for practical deployment and showed the effectiveness and feasibility of the devised strategy.