MHP Meets the Web: Bringing Web Contents to Digital TV for Interactive Entertainment

TV still remains the preferred medium for entertainment. With the introduction of interactive digital television (IDTV), new digital services can be now conveyed through this communication technology. In particular, bringing the Web to IDTV may represent an attractive opportunity to inject new fuel into the TV world, thus creating a wider and accessible container of digital services for entertainment. Yet, this raises several technical issues that need to be addressed. While a lot of research has been done with the aim of adjusting the content of a Web page so that it fits to a target computing environment, scarce efforts have been devoted to the specific TV target. Further, effective interfaces for digital TV must be devised which guarantee the same level of usability available through common PCs. In particular, contents must be structured such that: i) their management is facilitated on low-end set top boxes, and ii) their visualization is made effective for standard TV displays. In this context, we propose a new technique for the automatic transcoding of Web contents which enables their delivery over IDTV broadcast channels and allows a proper visualization on IDTV screens. Our system is based on the digital video broadcasting-multimedia home platform (DVB-MHP) standard. We also developed a client application which permits to browse our transcoded contents on a TV set via the remote control. Results gathered from real world experiments demonstrate the viability of our approach