Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Contributions to the design and development process of interactive applications for digital TV based on Ginga-NCL

Orientador: Yuzo IanoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: No entorno atual da televisão digital no Brasil, a interatividade é uma característica importante para se estabelecer uma plataforma de comunicação entre os usuários e as emissoras. O middleware Ginga, ainda em desenvolvimento, se apresenta como uma oportunidade para a interatividade por meio do Ginga-NCL, um framework que permite o desenvolvimento de aplicações usando as linguagens NCL e Lua. Porém, as formas de se implementar aplicações não são padronizadas, uma vez que os receptores no mercado são limitados em hardware e as aplicações nem sempre poderão ser executadas sem seguir algumas regras ou restrições para se otimizar as aplicações. Este trabalho oferece uma nova perspectiva sobre o desenvolvimento de gráfico de aplicações interativas, com técnicas para se otimizar os parâmetros limitantes, além de uma biblioteca de código aberto para se implementar um teclado virtual em qualquer aplicação Ginga-NCLAbstract: Interactivity for digital television is, nowadays, a very important feature to stablish a communication pathway between users and broadcasters, due to digital television's current status in Brazil. The Ginga middleware, still in development status, presents an opportunity for achieving interactivity via Ginga-NCL, a framework that allows application development and deployment using NCL and Lua programming languages. However, there are not standardised ways to develop applications, the currently available receivers in the market are very limited in hardware, and released applications will not be able to always execute flawlessly without standards or guidelines to optimise them. The author's work offers a new perspective on graphical environment development for interactive applications with techniques to optimise against the limiting factors, and presents an open-source library for implementing a virtual keyboard in any Ginga-NCL application as wellMestradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaMestre em Engenharia Elétric

AXMEDIS 2008

The AXMEDIS International Conference series aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, impacts and exploitation. The AXMEDIS events offer venues for exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research and also benefit business and industrial communities. In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage

User centered design of new and novel products : case digital television

Product development of innovative new products and applications like digital television is challenging. For new and novel products in general, there is no defined product direction given to the design team at the beginning of the project and there is no clear understanding of user requirements which results in constantly evolving product features. Yet there is a need for new or not-yet-existing hardware and software technologies but no earlier product versions or comparable existing products to benchmark against. User centered design aims to actively involve the users in product development in all phases of the new product design. The limits of user centered design and user research are that the users cannot address any particular future needs without prior experience or knowledge of the subject. Research methods such as usability testing are concerned about existing devices or prototypes but they do not tell directly which new technologies could help meet the users' future needs. New design methods which welcome users' active participation in gathering and interpreting the user data help to shift the point of interest from usability testing in the late phases of usability engineering life cycle to the early phases of product development. Digital television and the new interactive applications enable a transition in the user behavior from straightforward channel surfing to active application usage. This thesis concentrates on user centered design during the early phases of interactive application design for digital television. The aim of research was to find techniques to meet users' future needs and to provide examples of future product concepts. Several techniques were used: a user study based on 'Cultural probes' method, interviews, focus groups, design sessions, usability testing, and storytelling. The work documented here originates from the pre-digital television era in Finland between the years 1998-2003. The author has published her results in seven publications.reviewe

Intermediality and media change

This book is about intermediality as an approach to analysing and understanding media change. Intermediality and Media Change is critical of technological determinism that characterises 'new media discourse' about the ongoing digitalization, framed as a revolution and creating sharp contrasts between old and new media. Intermediality instead emphasises paying attention to continuities between media of all types and privileges a comparative perspective on technological changes in media over time and space. The concept of intermediality refers to interaction and interrelationships between media. This focus is important in two ways. It strengthens the mutual construction and articulation of media (forms) as a vital element of the research agenda. In contrast to the emphasis on convergence, it also permits the consideration of the parallel construction and articulation of specific features and identities that characterise a medium, as well as the emergence of new divergences. Intermediality and Media Change studies intermediality from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The book starts by positioning intermediality as a theory and a methodological approach. The first group of articles focuses on critical reflection of media and mediation as concepts. The second group deals with intermediality in discourses about media change. The third group concentrates on analysis of representative cases, and the fourth group focuses on media institutions and professions

A DVB-MHP web browser to pursue convergence between Digital Terrestrial Television and Internet

In the last decade with the growth of Interactive Digital Television (IDTV) we have seen the end of passive television. An example of this trend is Internet access through television by means of the last generation Set Top Boxes (STBs). The chance to enjoy web contents through digital television Set Top Boxes, delivering a satisfying browsing experience across this platform, could provide the opportunity to promote social inclusion and bridging the "digital divide". In this paper we present WebClimb, a web browser that would pursue an effective integration of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) and Internet in the DVB-MHP platform. WebClimb is a Java-based web browser that enables users to browse the web by interacting with an asy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI), driven by a common TV remote control without asking for reformatting such a content on the server side. In addition to this, the main requirement has been to design and develop an MHP browser application to be broadcast through a TV channel and not embedded in a specific device, though it could be too. Experimental results and a comparison with other possible solutions are provided