MHEG-5 common application interface for broadcast and interactive services

Abstract

As the world is becoming more connected, there is an ever increasing demand for new multimedia services. Their emergence is being favored by deregulation and converging technologies. In this scenario, standards are essential for delivering multimedia applications across heterogeneous platforms. The ISO MHEG-5 standard specifies an encoding format for multimedia applications independently of service paradigms, system architectures, and network protocols. It targets both the broadcast and the interactive domains, and is effective also on low-cost terminals, like set-top-boxes. The paper gives an overview of MHEG-5, describes the implementation of a run-time presentation engine, and illustrates the use of the standard in the emerging domain of interactive television.