Experiences from implementing a MHP receiver

Abstract

The growth of interactive digital TV heralds a seamless convergence of media, telecommunications, and information technology, offering viewers increasingly exciting and interactive programming. The need of standardization in this field led DVB to head the regulator project, defining standards for digital video broadcasting and interactive services in all transmission networks, and recently for a generic common interface (the MHP API) to enable interoperable applications to be downloaded from broadcast networks and executed on receivers with specific hardware and software implementations from any manufacturer. The software architecture of a MHP receiver consists of a multitask real-time OS that gives support to the middleware below the MHP API. This middleware consists of an application manager, the communications protocol stack and a Java VM together with suitable API. Conventional implementations of MHP receivers use a proprietary OS. In this paper, we present our experience implementing a prototype based on an open platform over RT-Linux.