PBS links up with Triveni for iTV trial
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Triveni Digital, have a agreed a partnership for trials of PBS enhanced programming in four episodes of Scientific American Frontiers.
March 27
The trials will be the first digital terrestrial (over-the-air) broadcast of interactive TV enhancements using the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF) Transport Type B specification.
ATVEF Transport B allows the enhanced content to be broadcast with the program, rather than requiring a connection to the Internet, thereby speeding up the delivery of the enhancements to the viewer.
Seven local PBS stations will participate in the trial -- WETA (Washington, DC), OPB (Portland, Oregon), NJN (New Jersey), MPBC (Lewiston, Maine), TPT, Twin Cities Public Television (St.Paul/Minneapolis), WHYY (Philadelphia), and KQED (San Francisco).
Enhanced streams with additional information about the program will be placed within each episode. Program-related enhancements will be encoded and distributed via satellite through PBS to member stations.
Additional enhancements, customized to local audiences, will be inserted into the local broadcast of each participating station.
Triveni Digital's SkyScraper data broadcasting systems will be used by PBS and the seven participating stations. The SkyScraper DataFab provides tools for a content provider like PBS to schedule, insert, and manage enhanced data securely.
The SkyScraper DataHub provides the broadcaster tools to allocate and manage bandwidth usage. The DataHub may transfer IP packets to an IP-MPEG2 gateway, which encapsulates them into MPEG2 transport packets and hands them off to the broadcast mux; or the DataHub may encapsulate the data into MPEG2 packets itself and hand them directly to the broadcast multiplexor.
The multiplexor and transmitter merge the data packets with the video program(s) and broadcast the complete transport stream. "The ability to add enhancements to programming, whether on a national, regional or local basis, is of extreme importance to the television industry, as broadcasters search for new content and business models to support their transition to digital television," said Mark Simpson, president of Triveni Digital.
