ITV

Siemens Interactive Application Center (IAC)

Television has traditionally been regarded as a „lean-back“ medium in which viewers settle into a comfortable chair or couch and enjoy shows passively during their free time. This dream was realized in its entirety with the invention of the remote control, as it was no longer necessary to leave the couch in order to change channels.
However, the remote control has now become the key to a revolutionary new technology which now enables television viewers to interact with television content without a change of medium. In this context, we distinguish between local interactivity, in which viewers can actively retrieve information (as they have done for years with teletext), and full interactivity, in which viewers can actually submit information and feedback from their own living rooms. Examples of this include participating in surveys or submitting orders and requests. Such offers appear to be especially attractive when they are directly linked to programming content.
All of these highly ambitious objectives were put into practice in the !TV4GRAZ pilot project .


	Pilot operation for digital terrestrial television and interactive MHP applacations
the project !TV4GRAZ applications production results imprint	Siemens Interactive Application Center (IAC) Television has traditionally been regarded as a „lean-back“ medium in which viewers settle into a comfortable chair or couch and enjoy shows passively during their free time. This dream was realized in its entirety with the invention of the remote control, as it was no longer necessary to leave the couch in order to change channels. However, the remote control has now become the key to a revolutionary new technology which now enables television viewers to interact with television content without a change of medium. In this context, we distinguish between local interactivity, in which viewers can actively retrieve information (as they have done for years with teletext), and full interactivity, in which viewers can actually submit information and feedback from their own living rooms. Examples of this include participating in surveys or submitting orders and requests. Such offers appear to be especially attractive when they are directly linked to programming content. All of these highly ambitious objectives were put into practice in the !TV4GRAZ pilot project .	Set-top boxes with return channels What does the viewer need at home in order to enjoy such exciting interactive content? The purpose of set-top boxes is to convert digital television signals into a format which can be displayed by the most common televisions today. These set-top boxes also integrate telephone lines into television technology. In the case of !TV4GRAZ, this was done by means of built-in analog modems or a connection to an ADSL broadband line. Once equipped with such a return channel, active television viewers can access an entirely new world of interactive television. The return channel connects the viewer to a data processing center (set up by Siemens in this project) via the Internet whenever necessary, and the viewer can use a wide variety of MHP-based applications without restrictions. No previous knowledge is required. The level of interactivity attained by the various applications in the pilot project is reflected in the name of our data processing center: Interactive Application Center (IAC). The center offered its services to various users as the central platform for all return channel activities.