BT Interactive TV delivering multimedia services to the home

Interactive multimedia is set to change the way that people go about their daily lives, both at work and at play. It will lead to the creation of a wealth of exciting new services to inform, communicate and entertain with stimulating moving images, graphics and sound. In the summer of 1995, BT began a market trial of Interactive Television to 2500 homes in the Ipswich and Colchester area. The trial aims to provide the nearest glimpse yet of the information society of the future. BT Interactive TV consists of nine main services: movies on demand; television programming on demand; children's TV; education; music videos; local life; games on demand; Adland and High Street, which incorporates home shopping and home banking. Services are ordered and controlled via a standard remote control, and delivered to a normal television over copper telephone lines for the majority of homes and over fibre to the remainder. In the basic architecture of Interactive TV, audio visual content is stored in a compressed digitised form on a video server. The server is accessed by a set top box, which is connected to the viewer's domestic TV set. Requests from the viewer are transmitted by a remote control to the set top box, which passes them over a relatively slow speed (9.6 kbit/s) back channel to the server. The server replies with a continuous stream of data at a rate of 2 Mbit/s that is unique to the viewer.