Behavioural Aspects of Interactive TV

Technological advancements, explosion of tools and integrated developing environments, availability of literature and guidance have made the development of applications for the Web and mobile platforms immensely popular for both the experienced and novice developers. However, in comparison, developing applications for the Television (TV) platform is still not something that many people talk about, even though TV is the most popular technology compared to personal computers today. This paper investigates the state of the play, technical and infrastructural support available and the general interest in developing applications for the TV platforms. Firstly, the paper discusses the currently available applications that one could classify as typical application for the TV platform, for example Teletext, Channel listings etc. It investigates the popularity of these applications in terms of their usage by the intended audience, i.e. general public, and why the developer’s community haven not fully embraced this technology in comparison to platforms such as the Web and Mobile. Secondly, it looks into the technical understanding necessary for developing and deploying these applications and reports its findings on the support available in terms of development tools and the TV service platform and architectural support available, from the developer’s standpoint. The focus will be a review of the technical aspects related to convergence of TV broadcasting and the Internet. For example – a) issues concerning conversion between the MPEG format on the TV side to IP format on the server side and vice versa, b) issues related to RTP transportation using TCP and UDP, and c) a discussion on issues such as synchronization and encoding during the convergence.