No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This paper presents some contributions towards Interactive Digital Television, focusing on interactivity for citizenship in the context of Brazilian Digital Television System Terrestrial (SBTVD-T/ISDB-TB). The paper is focused on the necessary infrastructure, applications and services that can help with the challenges of promoting digital inclusion in Brazil. In the infrastructure issue, the BluTV (Bringing All Users to the Television) is discussed, specially in terms of its components to develop interactive applications and to explore the back channel (interactivity channel). As a product of this investigation, a prototype of Interactive TV Application Guide to promote citizenship through digital inclusion is presented. Digital Inclusion and Citizenship; Interactive Television; Brazilian Digital Television System; iTV Applications.I.

We are using MPEG-4 technology to build applications to be used in real environments. One of these applications allows for teacher to send real-time lessons to this/her students or to record them. The Tele-Learning System under development includes: a) on the teacher side: a recording workstation with two cameras, microphone, specific MPEG-4 software; b) an IP network or an MPEG-2 TS satellite link; c) on the student side: a PC with special MPEG software, and a special board if receiving from satellite. This research focuses on the broadcast scenario where a satellite board is used in a PC. Thus, the work covers how to send the lesson even to a student that is not connected to the intranet, using a satellite link, either over IP embedded in the MPEG-2 TS or directly over MPEG-2 TS. For the security part it may be necessary to have a low-band return channel implemented, for example, through a mobile phone. The satellite environment may require the redesign of the User Interface and the retargeting of the elementary streams parameters in order to match specific requirements and features of the medium. At this point, new interaction criteria have been established from distribution of MPEG-4 media objects and MPEG-7 scene descriptions on network environments. Furthermore, context-awareness aspects are being added for providing personalization on the teaching-learning environment and MPEG-21 is being studied for applying to new multimedia requirements.