Semi-automated Mobile TV Service Generation

Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services becoming one of the future trends. However, current MDTV interactive service generation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers and the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, this paper proposes an innovative MDTV service generation solution, which introduces a semiautomatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. By employing open-standard technologies including XHTML and Java ME for the service presentation the proposed work benefits are twofold. Firstly it helps in reducing the technical demands of MDTV service production for service creators. Secondly it improves the inter-compatibility of the created service application amongst different MDTV standards. Initial test results indicate that the proposed solution allows for a faster and more effective MDTV interactive service generation.