The DVB's Portable Content Format (PCF) is a data format for the description of interactive digital television (iTV) services. It is intended to support the businessto-business interchange of interactive content and to enable deployment on multiple target platforms with a minimum amount of re-authoring. This will reduce both the production cost and time to air of iTV services. White Papers are ...

M arket acceptance of new personal computing products and services strongly depends on the quality of their user interfaces. Virtual reality is an emerging technology that promises significant advances in this area. The term itself is broad, ranging from simple 3D animation programs with no user interaction to systems with head-mounted displays, 3D manipulators, and other specialized hardware t...

The era of interactive TV will be characterized by value-added services wherein users can shop, play games and receive video-on-demand all using their television. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a rapid video browser that can easily be deployed on a TV set-top box to enhance the viewing of a recorded TV program. The vast penetration of VCRs and the proliferation of s...

This paper describes the personalization mechanism that is being implemented in the GMF4iTV Project. GMF4iTV is a European project which aims at developing techniques to create television programs with interactive objects using the DVB-MHP platform. Interactive objects are moving areas of the TV picture (generally superposed to characters, objects in the scene, or specific spots) with associate...

In the context of the PANACEIA-ITV IST European project, a home care service provision system is described based on interactive TV technology. The purpose of PANACEIA-ITV is to facilitate essential lifestyle changes and to promo te compliance with scientifically sound selfcare recommendations, through the application of interactive digital television for family health maintenance. The means to ...

By having implemented digital terrestrial television (DTT) in Latin American countries and taking into account their ability to develop interactive services, new possibilities have been opened for improved connectivity in rural areas and those with difficult access by using applications that enable ubiquitous communication. In order to transfer the existing knowledge from Spain and Europe, the ...

Images form integral part of interactive services broadcasted in digital television. Natural images compression is always trade-off between visual quality and file size. Annoying artifacts arise in highly compressed images. The scope of this article is to investigate the possibilities of image compression enhancement for interactive services. The aim is to decrease size of the image file in suc...

This paper presents results from a user study and a set of design sessions conducted in a broadcasting company. During the design sessions, the designers created new concepts of interactive television programs for given TV viewers. The creative work was based on user profiles collected in the preceding user study. The aim of research was to include the future users into the product development ...

Very large, high resolution, interactive screens—also known as interactive walls—can be used to deliver entertainment and advertising content that is qualitatively different from what is available in television, kiosk, or desktop formats. At a sufficient resolution and size, the touchable wall can offer the engaging interactivity of full-fledged entertainment software, but on a scale that enabl...

Why High Definition (HD) is Important Why are advances in video communications technology important? Such innovations matter because the productive value of interactive video is inextricably bound to the technology itself. After all, no one would watch television if it was difficult to turn on and had a low quality picture. Similarly, the reluctance to actively use video communications is linke...