Harnessing the Internet to improve broadcast TV services

Amidst the headline themes for last week's IPTV World Forum 2008 there was an interesting undercurrent surrounding the convergence of Internet sourced video and applications and classic Pay TV walled garden environments.

In its simplest form, the 'blending' of public and private network content could mean taking YouTube video or a Google map and transcoding the web 'stream' into MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 for delivery to the TV set. Avinity demonstrated exactly this with its Rendercast solution, claiming that headend transcoding enables compelling interactivity and animation without burdening set-top box CPUs or requiring that interactive applications are written for different middlewares.

Remi Blokker, VP Operations at Avinity, suggested that as every set-top box has an MPEG decoder, it makes sense to deliver interactivity off the Internet in this way. At the London exhibition the company showed how you can manipulate a Google map using the remote control, search Google for video and then play the video through the television. Rendercast can be used with MPEG-2 set-top boxes today and will be compatible with MPEG-4 in Q2.

"Our philosophy is that you should not put a browser on the television and that navigation should be through a remote control and curser key," Blokker explained. The Rendercast software is integrated with the existing middleware and the remote control keys make requests of the Internet server.

In more complex applications, classic broadcast television streams carrying interactive enhancements (a ‘Red Button’ type tag) can drive viewers to the Internet to expand upon their video-centric experience. Alcatel Lucent demonstrated a web portal created by a local German news channel containing streaming video and an advertising banner that clicks-through to a full-length, web-hosted commercial (in the demonstration it was an Audi advert).

Alcatel Lucent provides the web portal templates and media management tools to enable broadcasters to manage the portal themselves, as part of its Interactive Media Manager proposition. The IPTV World Forum demonstration was running on Microsoft MediaRoom's IPTV service delivery platform (middleware) and showed how easy it is to drive viewers through programming or an EPG to a destination containing quizzes or game show interaction - providing new revenue generating potential.

Miniweb also demonstrated how content/applications stored on the Internet can be accessed from the broadcast TV environment, in another potentially significant enhancement to traditional interactive TV. The company is marketing a technology/service that allows broadcast TV viewers with IP return paths to access content or applications on television-friendly Internet destinations. There, they can interact with programmes and advertising, etc, or source more video.

Miniweb demonstrated how viewers can search for online video and where appropriate, pay for content. This new-look interactivity can be applied to any broadcast platform where there is an IP return path from the set-top box. This could include free-to-air digital terrestrial set-top boxes. In fact, the company says that in the UK, it will be bringing to market broadband enabled Freeview set-top boxes that can handle this vision of 'Interactive TV 2.0' and broadband video.

At IPTV World Forum, the company demonstrated how a viewer can navigate from a broadcast TV channel to broadband video using the Miniweb interface, which includes video search. Users can also share the links with their friends.