Serving up Data for Enhanced DTV Programs

An important feature of digital television (DTV) is the ability to insert data into the broadcast stream to enhance the TV programming. Examples of applications enabled by this technology include interactive ads, interactive access to sports statistics during sports events, and interactive access to supplementary information during talk shows, news programs, documentaries, etc. This paper describes the basic technology for such enhanced DTV programming, and analyzes the architectural and scheduling issues that arise in connection with inserting data into the digital broadcast stream to support it. The primary focus is on so-called ATVEF (Advanced Television Enhancement Forum) applications in the context of the ATSC digital television standards, but most of the analysis applies equally well to other forms of enhanced DTV programming where data must be coordinated with the audio-video.

Published

2000-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00153

ISBN

978-1-61482-933-1