Multimedia Home Platform (DVB-MHP) is an open

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement ...

system

standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...

DVB Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) o ...

project for interactive digital television. The MHP enables the reception and execution of interactive,

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

-based applications on a TV-set. Interactive TV applications can be delivered over the broadcast channel, together with audio and video streams. These applications can be for example information services, games, interactive voting, e-mail, SMS or shopping. MHP applications can use an additional return channel that has to support IP.

Deployment

In May 2010 the largest deployments DVB-MHP are in Italy (

DVB-T DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in Feb ...

Korea Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic ...

(

DVB-S Digital Video Broadcasting – Satellite (DVB-S) is the original DVB standard for Satellite Television and dates from 1995, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997. The first commercial applications was by Star TV in Asia ...

), Belgium (

DVB-C Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable (DVB-C) is the DVB European consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital television over cable. This system transmits an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 family digital audio/digital video stream, using a QAM ...

) and

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

(

) with trials or small deployments in Germany, Spain, Austria,

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the ...

Uruguay Uruguay (; ), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay ( es, República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast; while bordering ...

and Australia. MHP service was also offered in

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bot ...

by Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (

Yleisradio Yleisradio Oy ( Finnish, literally "General Radio Ltd." or "General Broadcast Ltd."; abbr. Yle ; sv, Rundradion Ab, italics=no), translated to English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company, found ...

), but the service was shut down at the end of 2007 after technical failure. The shutdown wasn't ever officially announced. Ultimately the reason for the shutdown was that MHP never gained "critical mass". The main reasons for its lack of success in Finland were: 1) 50% of the Finnish households use the terrestrial network, where broadcasting of MHP applications can be really expensive, 2) TV broadcasters never told TV viewers about the MHP services—because the digitalization of the TV networks got extremely negative publicity in Finnish media, the broadcasters didn't want to upset their customers further if they had bought new expensive STBs which weren't capable of playing MHP apps, and 3) there were only a few MHP set-top boxes in the market—because Finland is such a small market, big manufacturers weren't interested in developing new MHP boxes just for Finland. MHP-capable STBs are no longer available in Finland. The U.S. cable industry has specified its own middleware system referred as OCAP, which is largely based on MHP. Currently, Belgium's largest cable provider

Telenet Telenet was an American commercial packet-switched network which went into service in 1975. It was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines ...

is rolling out their DVB-MHP system, called DigiBox. Norway's upcoming terrestrial digital TV network

NTV NTV may refer to: Television * NTV (Bangladesh), a Bengali-language satellite television channel in Bangladesh * NTV (India), Telugu regional channel * NTV (Kenya) * NTV (Mongolia), a television channel based in Mongolia * NTV (Newport Televis ...

will also use the DVB-MHP standard. In late 2008 the Info+ channel in Greece (part of the

ERT Digital ERT Digital ( el, ΕΡΤ Ψηφιακή) was a pilot project by ERT, the public broadcaster of Greece. It was the first legal attempt at digital television broadcasting in Greece, featuring four new channels: Cine+, Prisma+ Sport+ and Info+. It ...

platform) started broadcasting DVB-MHP info, however since standards have not been set as of February 2009 for digital television in Greece, most TV sets and DVB-T receivers sold in the country do not feature DVB-MHP.

Technology

The MHP specifies an extensive application execution environment for digital interactive TV, independent of the underlying, vendor-specific, hardware and software. This execution environment is based on the use of a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

and the definition of generic APIs that provide access to the interactive digital TV

terminal Terminal may refer to: Computing Hardware * Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together * Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line * Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output devi ...

's typical resources and facilities. The interoperable MHP applications are running on top of these APIs. A so-called Navigator-application, which is part of the terminal software, allows the user the access to all MHP applications and other DVB services (like TV and radio). Sometimes Navigator can be also a Java program itself but that is not a requirement. The MHP is just a part of a family of specifications, which all base on the

Globally Executable MHP Globally Executable MHP (GEM) is a DVB specification of a Java based middleware for TV broadcast receivers, IPTV terminals and Blu-ray players. GEM is an ETSI standard (ETSI TS 102 819, ETSI TS 102 728) and an ITU "Recommendation” (ITU-T J.202). ...

(GEM)-Standard, which was defined to allow the worldwide adoption of MHP.

DVB-HTML

MHP applications come in two flavours. The first type are

DVB-HTML DVB-HTML, or Digital Video Broadcast HyperText Markup Language, is a standard for allowing digital televisions to access web content. It is an optional part of the larger MHP1.1 standard of DVB. The specification is based on a modularized version ...

applications. These are not very popular, partly because the specification for DVB-HTML was only completed with

MHP 1.1 MHP may refer to: Companies and organizations *Mieschke Hofmann und Partner, a management and IT consultancy owned by Porsche *Mississippi Highway Patrol *Montana Highway Patrol *Myronivsky Hliboproduct, a Ukrainian agricultural company *Nationalis ...

, and partly because many broadcasters, box manufacturers and content developers find it too complex and difficult to implement. DVB-HTML applications are a set of

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

pages that are broadcast as part of a service. The spec is based around a modularized version of

XHTML Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, prior ...

1.1, and also includes

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...

2.0, DOM 2.0, and

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripti ...

DVB-J

The second, and by far the most popular flavour is DVB-J ( DVB-Java) applications. These are written in

using the MHP API set and consist of a set of

class Class or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differently ...

files that are broadcast with a service. DVB-Java applications are known as "

Xlet An Xlet is very similar to a Java applet and is originally introduced in Sun Microsystems's Java TV specification to support applications for Digital TV. Though Xlet looks superficially different from other application models in Java such as applet ...

s". These are a concept similar to applets for Web pages that has been introduced by Sun in the JavaTV specification. Like applets, the xlet interface allows an external source (the application manager in the case of an MHP receiver) to start and stop an application.DVB-J

Return channel

The MHP

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of s ...

es may provide a

backchannel Backchannel is the use of networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks. The term was coined from the linguistics term to describe listeners' behaviours during verbal ...

for applications that wish to communicate with the outside world, for example a voting or shopping application. Typical upstream backchannels are phone line or

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

Internet connection (

ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem can provide. ...

, or

56k A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more carr ...

in Italy, using a modem included in the set-top box).

DVB-RCT DVB-RCT (Digital Video Broadcasting - Return Channel Terrestrial), provides a method by which the DVB-T (and in theory DVB-T2 but DVB-T2 probably trialled first about 5 years after last DVB-RCT field trial) platform can become a bi-directional, asym ...

(Return Channel Terrestrial) is a wireless technology utilizing the DVB infrastructure. It provides a VHF/UHF Wireless Return Channel back to the broadcaster for Interactive Terrestrial TV. It provides a data-rate of several kbit/s per user, for voting, polls, email, teleshopping, etc. If return channel is present it should provide IP with

TLS TLS may refer to: Computing * Transport Layer Security, a cryptographic protocol for secure computer network communication * Thread level speculation, an optimisation on multiprocessor CPUs * Thread-local storage, a mechanism for allocating vari ...

support.

References

* Ulrich Reimers: DVB, The Family of International Standards for Digital Video Broadcasting, Second Edition, 2005, {{ISBN, 3-540-43545-X (chapter 14, MHP)

External links

MHP tutorialsMHP Knowledge DatabaseXleTView
an open source MHP emulator
Strategy & Technology MHP,OCAP and MHEG-5 solutionsAlticast SolutionsTV Without Borders
- MHP/OCAP Website from Steven Morris
dvb.org - DVB-RCT Return Channel TerrestrialInteractive TV ForumExploiting OSGi capabilities from MHP applicationstmira solutions
MH
broadcast server
and MH
iTV browser
and authoring tools.
Osmosys Open Standard solutionsOpenCaster free GPL licensed software for transport stream broadcastingFree practical MHP 1.1.2 Course in Spanish
Digital Video Broadcasting Interactive television Java virtual machine Digital Video Broadcasting software