OpenTV 5: Bringing multi-service TV to Life

Television is evolving at an unprecedented pace thanks to the convergence of broadcast, broadband and telephony networks, the growing consumer appetite for on-demand television and the emergence of multiple devices in the home on which audio-visual content and related applications can be viewed.

OpenTV 5 enters the rapidly changing environment to offer pay-TV operators and viewers a new generation of sophisticated middleware to enhance TV viewing and a technological solution that supports a wide range of applications across the multiple screens of personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

Olivier Wellmann, NAGRA Vice President, Product Development for the Middleware & Multi-Services Product Unit, explains the vision behind the product.

What is OpenTV 5 and how does it relate to the current generation of OpenTV middleware? OpenTV 5 is more than a next-release middleware product it represents a new category of solutions, designed for media convergence. This is really a connected Internet device that knows how to do television. It enables service providers to offer and monetize new applications and services in a fast changing and increasingly complex TV and connected home environment.

So it is a completely new middleware product. It's a totally new start and, because we decided to go down this route, we are able to change a lot of things compared to our current OpenTV 2 product releases. We were able to create a new category of solutions that not only addresses the challenges of the past, thanks to our 15 years digital television expertise, but also tackles the growing need of the hyper connected future. It is a really exciting piece of technology.

How would you describe the vision behind OpenTV 5? OpenTV 5 is a next-generation media-convergence platform for the connected home. It is a modular client-device solution that is designed to accelerate innovation, thereby enabling operators to launch new services to multiple devices across different networks and to maximise revenues through new business models. Thanks to the OpenTV 5 platform, pay-TV operators can really start to bring multi-service offerings to life.

In addition to its core function of enabling broadcast digital TV, OpenTV 5 enables hybrid connected TV scenarios, it makes advanced advertising and transactional services a reality, it drives the multi-device play not just on the set-top box but on any device through its multimedia home gateway capabilities. In other words, it enables the whole connected home ecosystem.

The great thing about OpenTV 5 is that it combines the latest web-based technology while marrying NAGRA's well-established digital television know-how to create a platform that is both flexible and modular, with a rich set of features and built-in security. It offers operators much greater ease of authoring new applications and a faster deployment of advanced services and applications.

The user experience is fundamental to OpenTV 5. The aim is to create a common user experience across different devices using mark-up language technology, which eases time-to-market and reduces application development complexity. As a result, it's possible for instance to have a rich TV guide that works on multiple devices, so that there is no need to redevelop and redesign applications.

What are the main features of OpenTV 5? As well as traditional TV-centric features which enable and enhance services such as broadcast TV, PVR, video-on-demand, over-the-top content and home networking the hybrid platform offered by OpenTV 5 also enables a wide range of innovative features. These include Social TV cloud-based applications, feature-rich and intuitive content discovery, content transcoding for streaming to other devices, and built-in data analytics. In addition, because OpenTV 5 is an Internet device, most HTML5 and Web technology and services apply with minor adjustments. This opens the door to an unprecedented level of innovations to the television environment.

What are the most important technological aspects of OpenTV 5? Most important is the fact that OpenTV 5 leverages Linux, and Linux brings a lot of key benefits in terms of implementing best-of-breed components and applications. If something good exists in the open-source community, we can quickly integrate it into the product for instance, GStreamer for presenting, recording and serving multimedia streams, and D-Bus for inter-process communications. Similarly, we added our proven proprietary TV middleware components and we manage the integrated delivery as a product, with the benefits it brings in terms of robustness and support.

In parallel, we revisited a lot of the previous generation middleware paradigm and really tried to solve the issues that the industry has faced, such as long lead time and difficult integration cycles. For instance, OpenTV 5 uses standard Linux drivers. We were thus able to dramatically reduce the number of middleware drivers needed. There are more than 100 drivers in OpenTV 2, but there are just 18 in OpenTV 5. Also, we have worked even more closely with the major SoC vendors. This obviously helps portability, reliability and time-to-market. Another innovation example is what we have done with network integration. Prior, the middleware would have had to add a lot of specific network adjustments as to integrate into a specific customer environment. These specific developments were often difficult to quickly bring in and time consuming. We completely changed the OS architecture to a Declarative Configuration framework, reducing the amount of native code needed to deploy by bringing the operator customization needs to be declarative (XML based). This drastically reduces the time-to-market as well.

As well as Linux, the HTML5 and SVG standards play a key role in OpenTV 5, along with newer standards such as CSS3 and Canvas

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