Basics of Interactive TV

Beside the normal services provided by the current telephone and cable services, Interactive TV will provide a variety of new services to homes, such as:

• video-on-demand
• home shopping, banking
• interactive single/multiple player games
• interactive entertainment
• digital multimedia libraries
• electronic newspapers, magazines, yellow pages, etc.

The MHEG standard (Chapter 23) has been explicitly designed with this in mind.

The are a few delivery mechanism available for the medium:

Telephone Network:

• Advantage: High availability, security. Good support for interactive/two way traffic
• Disadvantage: Low band width

Cable Network:

• Analog video down the wire

• Advantage: High band width
• Disadvantage: Little infrastructure for long-distance, low security, harder for two way traffic (Fig. 28.4).

Cable Network