From analogue to digital

In the last half of the 20 th century we saw the rise of the tv, taking up an important place in our life. Most people can barely imagine a life without tv, it opens a window on our world, and allows for quick entertainment, information and leisure. The tv signal most of us are now receiving is still an analogue one. Just as we saw the shift to the digital world in storage of music and video (from LP to CD, from VHS to DVD) we are now seeing the transition to digital tv. All over the world digital tv is being deployed and analogue tv will most likely be pushed out of the market. On the Swedish isle of Gotland, the analogue tv era came to an end on 19 September 2005. The EU expects to stop with analogue tv by 2012.

There are several alternatives in the way digital tv is delivered. Digital tv can be offered over a one-way delivery channel (just like analogue tv nowadays) or using two-way communication. Digitalisation assures a better quality of the signal arriving at your home, and introduces some extra services such as the Electronic Program Guide. This guide allows you to overview the tv scheme for the night and makes selection easier.

With digital tv the user gets more than just the audiovisual content. The digital framework allows sending data together with this audiovisual content. This data can be anything a service provider chooses: biographies for the actors in a movie, historic info on your football team,...

All these services are however inherently one-way, the extra data is sent from the provider to the user. Thus the user can not send a response or a specific request for some specific data. This is due to the one-way transmission, as was used for classical analogue tv. However with the introduction of digital tv, it is also possible to provide two-way communication. We use the term back channel for the communication from the home user to the service provider. This opens up the world of interactive tv.

Interactive tv

With the advent of digital tv, passive watching is out. The tv no longer is a one-way channel of communication; the viewer gets involved and actively takes part with the events on his tv. Now you can interact on your favorite program, pause your program while answering a phone call, or chat with your friends and discuss your team’s performance during a football match and send SMSs to your friends with your remote-control. You can join your favorite quiz-show, and see if you really beat the candidates on tv.

With interactive tv it is possible to exchange personalized information between several viewers. It is thus possible to send messages to a particular user or group of users, from simple e-mail messages to short messages and even chat applications. Such applications are well known, and quite a success in the PC world, where e.g. Instant Messaging is something people couldn't miss any longer.

The digital tv paradigm will also cause some reorganization in the provider world. Up to now we only saw content providers, providing you with the audiovisual content we are all familiar with. However with the introduction of interactive tv, there is also a place in the market for creating the interactive services. These services consist of two major parts, first of all there is the application itself, like a play along quiz. But secondly there is also the interactive data needed for those applications. This interactive data content must also be delivered via the digital tv platform. We are actively involved in study and development of such delivery mechanisms and their practical uses.

Our experts have been working on different interactive tv projects and can help you create & develop new services.

• development of community based applications.
• involvement in study and development of service delivery mechanisms and their practical uses.