ITV

When preparations for the !TV4GRAZ project at ORF began and ORF‘s staff started working more intensively on developing sustainable ITV products which best suited the needs of the market, it soon became clear that more than just one ITV portal would be developed. From ORF‘s perspective, it did not seem sensible to pack all of the functions which one might conceivably expect from multimedia TV portals into a single product. In light of the varying media use expectations among television viewers, ORF decided to offer three ITV portals, each different in its functions and content, for the test households in Graz. These portals were INFOTEXT, a comprehensive news and information portal containing all kinds of hard news and mainly based on the data pool used in ORF‘s analog teletext. The second portal, called TV JETZT (TV NOW) in the Graz project, offers additional, in-depth information about the show currently on the air. The content for this portal was created by a newly established ITV editorial staff in cooperation with the editorial staff for ORF television. The third portal developed was our electronic program guide EPG4GRAZ, which contained schedule information for ORF‘s channels as well as !TV4GRAZ and ATVplus. The schedule information necessary for this guide was supplied by each channel and fed into the EPG portal by ORF.


	Pilot operation for digital terrestrial television and interactive MHP applacations
the project !TV4GRAZ applications production results imprint	Developing the ORF OK product family for ITV When preparations for the !TV4GRAZ project at ORF began and ORF‘s staff started working more intensively on developing sustainable ITV products which best suited the needs of the market, it soon became clear that more than just one ITV portal would be developed. From ORF‘s perspective, it did not seem sensible to pack all of the functions which one might conceivably expect from multimedia TV portals into a single product. In light of the varying media use expectations among television viewers, ORF decided to offer three ITV portals, each different in its functions and content, for the test households in Graz. These portals were INFOTEXT, a comprehensive news and information portal containing all kinds of hard news and mainly based on the data pool used in ORF‘s analog teletext. The second portal, called TV JETZT (TV NOW) in the Graz project, offers additional, in-depth information about the show currently on the air. The content for this portal was created by a newly established ITV editorial staff in cooperation with the editorial staff for ORF television. The third portal developed was our electronic program guide EPG4GRAZ, which contained schedule information for ORF‘s channels as well as !TV4GRAZ and ATVplus. The schedule information necessary for this guide was supplied by each channel and fed into the EPG portal by ORF.	Managing complexity: ORF‘s ITV architecture and the ITV controller The plan of offering three portals quickly gave rise to a number of highly complex questions in software planning and programming which would not have arisen in the case of a single portal: • How will the individual portals be related in terms of design and navigation? • How will their functions be coordinated? • Will each application be programmed separately, or can the three portals – despite their differences – use a common software basis? • How can we make the users aware that there are multiple portals and how will they access the portal of their choice directly from the shows they watch? • How can three applications offered simultaneously be technically coordinated, reviewed and controlled in order to ensure optimum performance? Together with the Styrian-American consulting company BearingPoint, ORF‘s ITV development team compiled a detailed catalog of specifications to answer all of the questions above. It was on the basis of this ITV architecture that the individual services could be designed in such a way that they were all able to function together and independently.