ITV Handbook

Interactivetelevision (iTV) is an evolutionary merging of digital TV and theinternet. iTV technology offers new powerful ways for consumers tointeract with content and service providers. In Europe, iTV hasgained significant traction during the turn of the century. Forexample, about 500,000 viewers signed up for SkyDigital's emailservice during 2000. In another example, Nickelodeon's "WatchYour Own Week" voting application was available to SkyDigitalviewers during Oct 22-27 2001. While only 100,000 votes wereanticipated for the whole week, this goal was reached within twodays; a total of 578,000 votes were recorded for the week. Today,Europe counts tens of millions of iTV consumers. The iTV Handbook isa broad overview of the business and technical issues, and could beused as a textbook for an introductory technical course: it lays outthe current thinking on commercially viable uses of iTV, surveys therelated technical standards, and describes a broad range oftechnologies and the relationships among them. A whole chapter isdevoted to the big picture of the iTV food chain, and another keychapter is devoted to a survey of media streaming methods. A "filesystem in the sky" is described which is the broadcastingequivalent of the network file system, and can be used to eliminatethe notorious "hot spot" encountered when millions ofreceivers are trying to access a small set of pages. The bookprovides many rare insights into the nuts and bolts of thetechnologies being used. For example, the book presents part of thetheoretical foundation for MP3 compression, and describes in detailmany popular file formats used to deliver iTV content, including GIF,QuickTime, AVI, and ZIP.