By Anthony J. Wasilewski, Scientific-Atlanta, Inc
Two aspects of a secure, portable environment for interactive DTV services are discussed. The OpenCable POD and an open middleware approach can be useful tools on “the road to retail”. The OpenCable Point of Deployment (POD) module is an important component of the open standards specifications for digital TV. The POD supports the total separation of the conditional access system from the host terminal while still supporting a wide array of features and applications and providing high performance video/audio/data services. By allowing host terminals to become more generic, the POD may play a critical role in any transition to retail availability of settops. This paper will cover the following aspects of the POD: · Brief History/Origins · Regulatory Issues and Timelines · Relevant Standards & Documents · Architecture and Features · Interface Descriptions · Copy Protection To complete the support of an open platform for hosting of a rich set of portable services, the application software environment of the host also needs to be standardized. The goal is to provide an environment in which a large measure of freedom to craft applications with varied feature sets and powerful graphics exists, while also fostering a high degree of portability of those applications to different hardware platforms. To this end, this paper describes an open set of middleware that includes: · HTML · Javascript (ECMAScript) · MIME · Personal Java · XML · HTTP · SSL · DOM · XHTML · ATVEF .These middleware components can be and/or are deployed on existing digital set-tops in currently launched systems.