Opportunities for data broadcasting in terrestrial digital TV

Summary form only given. Data broadcasting offers many new opportunities for terrestrial digital TV broadcasters. In this presentation, we provide an overview of the technology and the standards that have been developed within ATSC for enabling this area. In a television broadcast, audio and video occupy a significant portion of the overall bandwidth, but there is still enough bandwidth available that can be used for arbitrary data. Various kinds of data can be transmitted; for instance, software updates, multimedia files, websites, etc. Thus, very interesting and useful applications can be enabled on receivers. Different kinds of receivers can exist in the field, like set-top boxes and PC-based cards. We describe methods for classifying data broadcast applications in terms of target audience, type of data transmitted, etc. A successful data broadcasting system must meet a number of application requirements, for instance, data bandwidth management, error recovery, etc. We present a software architecture that can meet the challenging requirements. We present field experiences with data broadcasting in several different deployments. We also discuss the future for this technology and some emerging applications.