Interactive TV Standards: A Guide to MHP, OCAP, and JavaTV

For any digital TV developer or manager, the maze of standards and specifications related to MHP and OCAP is daunting-you have to patch together pieces from several standards to gather all the necessary knowledge you need to compete worldwide. The standards themselves can be confusing, and contain many inconsistencies and missing pieces. Interactive TV Standards provides a guide for actually deploying these technologies for a broadcaster or product and application developer. Understanding what the APIs do is essential for your job, but understanding how the APIs work and how they relate to each other at a deeper level helps you do it better, faster and easier. Learn how to spot when something that looks like a good solution to a problem really isn't. Understand how the many standards that make up MHP fit together, and implement them effectively and quickly. Two DVB insiders teach you which elements of the standards that are needed for digital TV, highlight those elements that are not needed, and explain the special requirements that MHP places on implementations of these standards. Once you've mastered the basics, you will learn how to develop products for US, European, and Asian markets--saving time and money. By detailing how a team can develop products for both the OCAP and MHP markets, Interactive TV Standards teaches you how to to leverage your experience with one of these standards into the skills and knowledge needed to work with the critical, related standards. Does the team developing a receiver have all the knowledge they need to succeed, or have they missed important information in an apparently unrelated standard? Does an application developer really know how to write a reliable piece of software that runs on any MHP or OCAP receiver? Does the broadcaster understand the business and technical issues well enough to deploy MHP successfully, or will their project fail? Increase your chances of success the first time with Interactive TV Standards.

Steven Morris is an experienced developer in the area of interactive digital television. Formerly of Philips Electronics, one of the major players in the development of MHP, he was heavily involved in the development of the standard, its predecessors, and related standards such as JavaTV. In addition to work on the standard itself, Steven has experience developing MHP middleware and applications and is the Webmaster and content author for the 'Interactive TV Web' website (www.interactivetvweb.org and www.mhp-interactive.org), a key resource for MHP, JavaTV and OCAP developers.

Anthony Smith-Chaigneau is the former Head of Marketing & Communications for the DVB Consortium. In that role, he created the first MHP website www.mhp.org and was responsible for driving the market implementation of this specification. Anthony left the DVB to join Advanced Digital Broadcast, where he helped them bring the first commercial MHP receivers to market. He is still heavily involved in the DVB MHP committees with Osmosys, an MHP and OCAP licensing company, based out of Switzerland.