Metadata Provision Services in Bidirectional Environments

Abstract

Most standardization work carried out within TV-Anytime Phase 1 was built assuming as a reference a limited connectivity of the user’s receiver, supposing only the existence of a unidirectional channel between the operator and the viewers’ homes. However, this was not always the case and, and, already in Phase 1, there were some sections of the specification that dealt with the standardization of different aspects concerning communication between the receiver and the outside through a bidirectional access network (e.g. the Internet) through which it was possible to make requests to the operator or third parties and receive responses from them.

This is the case of most of the contents of this chapter, where we will describe some guidelines that TV-Anytime establishes to standardize the communication with external servers (from the operator or third parties) that provide metadata provision services on demand.