Arturo A. Rodriguez

Design issues for interactive television systems

Computing, communication, and relevant standards are on the brink of enabling thousands of people to enjoy the services offered by large, distributed multimedia systems in their own homes. Collectively, these services will include TV (basic, subscription, and pay-per-view), service navigator, interactive entertainment, digital audio, video-on-demand, home shopping, financial transactions, interactive single- and multiuser games, digital multimedia libraries, and electronic versions of newspapers, magazines, TV program guides, and yellow pages. It is obvious that current TV systems and architectures must be redesigned to support such services. In this article, we propose potential solutions to modify existing systems to support these new functions, and we discuss related matters. >

Scripting languages emerge in standards bodies

Scripting languages have become part of many of the ongoing standards activities related to multimedia. MPEG-4 has considered the inclusion of downloading mechanisms and a set of languages that could include a scripting language. MPEG III has considered the use of DSM-RSF as the reference script language for example decodings. One of the subgroups of the Digital Audio/Visual Council (Davic) could define a scripting language as part of the set-top box application programming interface. And the Hypermedia Languages Special Working Group of ISO JTC1/SCI8/WG8 (the same group responsible for SGML, HyTime, and other broadly applied document processing standards) is developing the Standard Multimedia/Hypermedia Scripting Language.