Multimedia Home Platform
Encyclopedia
Multimedia Home Platform (DVB-MHP) is an open middleware
Middleware
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...

 system standard
Standardization
Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....

 designed by the DVB project for interactive digital television
Interactive television
Interactive television describes a number of techniques that allow viewers to interact with television content as they view it.- Definitions :...

. The MHP enables the reception and execution of interactive, Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

-based applications on a TV-set. Interactive TV applications can be delivered over the broadcast channel, together with audio and video streams. These applications can be for example information services, games, interactive voting, e-mail, SMS or shopping. MHP applications can use an additional return channel that has to support IP
Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol is the principal communications protocol used for relaying datagrams across an internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite...

.

Deployment

In May 2010 the largest deployments DVB-MHP are in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 (DVB-T
DVB-T
DVB-T is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial; it is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in the UK in 1998...

), Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...

 (DVB-S
DVB-S
DVB-S is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting — Satellite; it is the original Digital Video Broadcasting forward error coding and demodulation standard for satellite television and dates from 1994, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997...

), Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

 (DVB-C
DVB-C
DVB-C stands for Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable and it is the DVB European consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital television over cable...

) and Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 (DVB-S
DVB-S
DVB-S is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting — Satellite; it is the original Digital Video Broadcasting forward error coding and demodulation standard for satellite television and dates from 1994, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997...

) with trials or small deployments in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

, Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

, Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

 and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

.

MHP service was also offered in Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

 by Finnish Broadcating Corporation (Yleisradio), but the service was shutdown at the end of 2007 after technical failure. The shutdown wasn't ever officially announced. Ultimately the reason for the shutdown was that MHP never gained "critical mass". The main reasons for its lack of success in Finland were: 1) 50% of the Finnish households use the terrestrial network, where broadcasting of MHP applications can be really expensive, 2) TV broadcasters never told TV viewers about the MHP services—because the digitalization of the TV networks got extremely negative publicity in Finnish media, the brodcasters didn't want to upset their customers further if they had bought new expensive STBs which weren't capable of playing MHP apps, and 3) there were only a few MHP set-top boxes in the market—because Finland is such a small market, big manufacturers weren't interested in developing new MHP boxes just for Finland. MHP-capable STBs are no longer available in Finland.

The U.S. cable industry has specified its own middleware system referred as OCAP
OpenCable Application Platform
The OpenCable Application Platform, or OCAP, is an operating system layer designed for consumer electronics that connect to a cable television system, the Java-based middleware portion of the platform. Unlike operating systems on a personal computer, the cable company controls what OCAP programs...

, which is largely based on MHP.
Currently, Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

's largest cable provider Telenet
Telenet (Belgium)
Telenet Group is the largest provider of broadband cable services in Belgium. Its business comprises the provision of analog and digital cable television, high speed internet and fixed and mobile telephony services, primarily to residential customers in Flanders and Brussels...

 is rolling out their DVB-MHP system, called DigiBox. Norway's upcoming terrestrial digital TV network NTV
Norges televisjon
Norges Televisjon AS, or NTV, is the company that holds the concession to operate the digital terrestrial television network in Norway. The infrastructure is owned by the Telenor-subsidiary Norkring, while the content is provided by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and RiksTV. The company...

 will also use the DVB-MHP standard. In late 2008 the Info+ channel in Greece (part of the ERT Digital
ERT Digital
ERT Digital is a pilot project from ERT, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation. It is the first legal attempt of DVB-T broadcasting in Greece, featuring 4 all new digital television channels: Cine+, Prisma+ Sport+ and Info+...

 platform) started broadcasting DVB-MHP info, however since standards have not been set as of February 2009 for digital television in Greece, most TV sets and DVB-T receivers sold in the country do not feature DVB-MHP.

Technology

The MHP specifies an extensive application execution environment for digital interactive TV, independent of the underlying, vendor-specific, hardware and software. This execution environment is based on the use of a Java virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...

 and the definition of generic APIs that provide access to the interactive digital TV terminal
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...

's typical resources and facilities. The interoperable MHP applications are running on top of these APIs. A so-called Navigator-application, which is part of the terminal software, allows the user the access to all MHP applications and other DVB services (like TV and radio). Sometimes Navigator can be also a Java program itself but that is not a requirement.

The MHP is just a part of a family of specifications, which all base on the Globally Executable MHP
Globally Executable MHP
Globally Executable MHP is a DVB specification of a Java based middleware for TV broadcast receivers, IPTV terminals and Blu-ray players. GEM is an ETSI standard and an ITU "Recommendation...

 (GEM)-Standard, which was defined to allow the worldwide adoption of MHP.

DVB-HTML

MHP applications come in two flavours. The first type are DVB-HTML
DVB-HTML
DVB-HTML, or Digital Video Broadcast HyperText Markup Language, is a standard for allowing digital televisions to access web content. It is an optional part of the larger MHP1.1 standard of DVB....

 applications. These are not very popular, partly because the specification for DVB-HTML was only completed with MHP 1.1, and partly because many broadcasters, box manufacturers and content developers find it too complex and difficult to implement. DVB-HTML applications are a set of HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 pages that are broadcast as part of a service. The spec is based around a modularized version of XHTML
XHTML
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

 1.1, and also includes CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

 2.0, DOM
Document Object Model
The Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Aspects of the DOM may be addressed and manipulated within the syntax of the programming language in use...

 2.0, and ECMAScript
ECMAScript
ECMAScript is the scripting language standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used for client-side scripting on the web, in the form of several well-known dialects such as JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript.- History :JavaScript...

.

DVB-J

The second, and by far the most popular flavour is DVB-J (DVB-Java) applications. These are written in Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 using the MHP API set and consist of a set of class
Class (computer science)
In object-oriented programming, a class is a construct that is used as a blueprint to create instances of itself – referred to as class instances, class objects, instance objects or simply objects. A class defines constituent members which enable these class instances to have state and behavior...

 files that are broadcast with a service. DVB-Java applications are known as "Xlet
Xlet
An Xlet is very similar to a Java applet and is originally introduced in Sun's Java TV specification to support applications for Digital TV. Though Xlet looks superficially different from other application models in Java such as applet and MIDlet, it is actually meant to be a generalization of such...

s". These are a concept similar to applets for Web pages that has been introduced by Sun in the JavaTV specification. Like applets, the xlet interface allows an external source (the application manager in the case of an MHP receiver) to start and stop an application.

Return channel

The MHP set-top box
Set-top box
A set-top box or set-top unit is an information appliance device that generally contains a tuner and connects to a television set and an external source of signal, turning the signal into content which is then displayed on the television screen or other display device.-History:Before the...

es may provide a backchannel
Backchannel
Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks. The term was coined in the field of Linguistics to describe listeners' behaviours during verbal communication, Victor Yngve 1970.The term "backchannel" generally...

 for applications that wish to communicate with the outside world, for example a voting or shopping application. Typical upstream backchannels are phone line or broadband
Broadband
The term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal or device of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal or device . Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times...

 Internet connection (ADSL
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
Asymmetric digital subscriber line is a type of digital subscriber line technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem can provide. It does this by utilizing frequencies that are not used by a voice...

, using a simple ADSL modem included in the set-top box). DVB-RCT
DVB-RCT
DVB-RCT , provides a method by which the DVB-T platform can become a bi-directional, asymmetric, broadband and wireless path between broadcasters and customers...

 (Return Channel Terrestrial) is a wireless technology utilizing the DVB infrastructure. It provides a VHF/UHF Wireless Return Channel back to the broadcaster for Interactive
Terrestrial TV. It provides a data-rate of several kbit/s per user, for voting, polls, email, teleshopping, etc. If return cannel is present it should provide IP
Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol is the principal communications protocol used for relaying datagrams across an internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite...

 with TLS
TLS
-Computing:* Transport Layer Security, a network protocol and successor to Secure Sockets Layer * Thread-local storage, a mechanism for allocating variables in computer science...

 support.

See also

  • MHEG-5
    MHEG-5
    MHEG-5, or ISO/IEC 13522-5, is part of a set of international standards relating to the presentation of multimedia information, standardised by the Multimedia and Hypermedia Experts Group...

  • BD-J
    BD-J
    BD-J, or Blu-ray Disc Java, is a specification supporting Java ME Xlets for advanced content on Blu-ray Disc and the Packaged Media profile of Globally Executable MHP .BD-J allows bonus content on Blu-ray Disc titles to be far more sophisticated than bonus content provided by standard DVD,...

  • Interactive television
    Interactive television
    Interactive television describes a number of techniques that allow viewers to interact with television content as they view it.- Definitions :...

  • IP over DVB
    IP over DVB
    IP over DVB or IP over MPEG implies that Internet Protocol datagrams are transferred over the MPEG transport stream, and are distributed using some digital television system, for example DVB-H, DVB-T, DVB-S or DVB-C.-Application examples:...

  • OSGi
    OSGi
    The Open Services Gateway initiative framework is a module system and service platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and dynamic component model, something that does not exist in standalone Java/VM environments...

  • Datacasting
    Datacasting
    Datacasting is the broadcasting of data over a wide area via radio waves. It most often refers to supplemental information sent by television stations along with digital television, but may also be applied to digital signals on analog TV or radio...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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