Customized television: Standards compliant advanced digital television

This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user’s or group of user’s preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information

A medium to long term roadmap for access services on DTV

DTV4All is a project partly funded by the European Commission (CIP ICT Policy Support Programme) to facilitate the provision of access services on digital television across the European Union. Access services literally help their users access the content of television programmes. Important examples of access services for people who are hard of hearing or deaf are subtitles and deaf signing provided with television programmes to allow their users to more fully appreciate the programme dialogue. The primary aim of the DTV4All project is to encourage the roll out of access services on digital television across the EC. To do this the project targets eroding the barriers to the roll out of access services by making clear what these barriers are and how they may be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the progress the project has made in its first two years in meeting this target

Challenges of digital innovations : a set-top box based approach

The chapter analyses the challenges of digital technology for television audience measurement systems. First, the current state of audience measurement in Belgium is described. In the Belgian case, the traditional television audience measurement system is contested by small broadcasters and challenged by the opportunities that the emergence of digital television and, more specifically, the widespread diffusion of set-top boxes provide. Second, three major challenges for traditional measurement techniques are analysed. This section deals with people’s changing viewing habits, for example on-demand and time-shifted viewing, the provision of more accurate data by set-top boxes, and the increasing interests of platform operators acting as gatekeepers to access to this data. In the final section, conclusions are made

A survey of digital television broadcast transmission techniques

This paper is a survey of the transmission techniques used in digital television (TV) standards worldwide. With the increase in the demand for High-Definition (HD) TV, video-on-demand and mobile TV services, there was a real need for more bandwidth-efficient, flawless and crisp video quality, which motivated the migration from analogue to digital broadcasting. In this paper we present a brief history of the development of TV and then we survey the transmission technology used in different digital terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile TV standards in different parts of the world. First, we present the Digital Video Broadcasting standards developed in Europe for terrestrial (DVB-T/T2), for satellite (DVB-S/S2), for cable (DVB-C) and for hand-held transmission (DVB-H). We then describe the Advanced Television System Committee standards developed in the USA both for terrestrial (ATSC) and for hand-held transmission (ATSC-M/H). We continue by describing the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting standards developed in Japan for Terrestrial (ISDB-T) and Satellite (ISDB-S) transmission and then present the International System for Digital Television (ISDTV), which was developed in Brazil by adopteding the ISDB-T physical layer architecture. Following the ISDTV, we describe the Digital Terrestrial television Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standard developed in China. Finally, as a design example, we highlight the physical layer implementation of the DVB-T2 standar

Delivery of broadband services to SubSaharan Africa via Nigerian communications satellite

Africa is the least wired continent in the world in terms of robust telecommunications infrastructure and systems to cater for its more than one billion people. African nations are mostly still in the early stages of Information Communications Technology (ICT) development as verified by the relatively low ICT Development Index (IDI) values of all countries in the African region. In developing nations, mobile broadband subscriptions and penetration between 2000-2009 was increasingly more popular than fixed broadband subscriptions. To achieve the goal of universal access, with rapid implementation of ICT infrastructure to complement the sparsely distributed terrestrial networks in the hinterlands and leveraging the adequate submarine cables along the African coastline, African nations and their stakeholders are promoting and implementing Communication Satellite systems, particularly in Nigeria, to help bridge the digital hiatus. This paper examines the effectiveness of communication satellites in delivering broadband-based services

Service Platform for Converged Interactive Broadband Broadcast and Cellular Wireless

A converged broadcast and telecommunication service platform is presented that is able to create, deliver, and manage interactive, multimedia content and services for consumption on three different terminal types. The motivations of service providers for designing converged interactive multimedia services, which are crafted for their individual requirements, are investigated. The overall design of the system is presented with particular emphasis placed on the operational features of each of the sub-systems, the flows of media and metadata through the sub-systems and the formats and protocols required for inter-communication between them. The key features of tools required for creating converged interactive multimedia content for a range of different end-user terminal types are examined. Finally possible enhancements to this system are discussed. This study is of particular interest to those organizations currently conducting trials and commercial launches of DVB-H services because it provides them with an insight of the various additional functions required in the service provisioning platforms to provide fully interactive services to a range of different mobile terminal types

Distributed video coding in wireless multimedia sensor network for multimedia broadcasting

Recently the development of Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has provided the promising theory support to realize the infrastructure of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN), which composed of autonomous hardware for capturing and transmission of quality audio-visual content. The implementation of DVC in WMSN can better solve the problem of energy constraint of the sensor nodes due to the benefit of lower computational encoder in DVC. In this paper, a practical DVC scheme, pixel-domain Wyner-Ziv(PDWZ) video coding, with slice structure and adaptive rate selection(ARS) is proposed to solve the certain problems when applying DVC into WMSN. Firstly, the proposed slice structure in PDWZ has extended the feasibility of PDWZ to work with any interleaver size used in Slepian-wolf turbo codec for heterogeneous applications. Meanwhile, based on the slice structure, an adaptive code rate selection has been proposed aiming at reduce the system delay occurred in feedback request. The simulation results clearly showed the enhancement in R-D performance and perceptual quality. It also can be observed that system delay caused by frequent feedback is greatly reduced, which gives a promising support for WMSN with low latency and facilitates the QoS management

Reliable Download Delivery in a Terrestrial DAB Network

Reliable file transfer is important in broadcast networks. In this paper, we have investigated if it is useful to extend the DAB standard with Fountain codes. To evaluate this, results from measurements in a live Single Frequency Network (SFN) were used. Our results show that the existing error correction algorithms provide already reliable file delivery, so there is no need to extend the DAB standard

Scenarios for the Internet Migration of the Television Industry

All the conditions for the television industry’s migration to the Internet are now in place. While this migration will be gradual, it will have a deep-seated impact on the industry:•the exclusive rights model will no longer be the standard;•some consumers will abandon traditional managed networks;•a globalization trend will be sparked, to the benefit of the major rights holders. Unlike the music and print media industries, the TV industry is gaining a strong position on the Web. As a result, television is poised to play a central role in video services. This offensive strategy will likely pay off down the line, but does not entirely eliminate the possibility of destroying value. There are structural reasons for this, including a fiercely competitive online advertising market and a lack of control over program circulation. Far from being simply transitory, the 2009-2010 economic downturn marks the beginning of a decade of restructuring for the TV industry. This new period will begin with an overall decline in the sector’s resources before increasingly varied consumption patterns spur a new period of growth. The decade running from 2010 to 2020 will also be a period that focuses on cost control, with the industrialization of TV production that will depart once and for all from its historical model, i.e., film. This migration to the Web poses a threat to the European industry in particular. A reassessment of the television industry’s regulatory strategy appears both necessary and urgent, and will involve the creation of integrated pan-European conglomerates.Television, video, networks, on-demand, connected devices, advertising, pay-TV.