Global standard for iTV almost a reality

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The DVB's objective to create a write once, run anywhere environment for interactive television applications is now closer to realisation. With the earlier announcements from CableLabs and the ITU, followed by the ARIB in Japan and now the ATSC all endorsing the principle of a global standards for interactive television, DVB's market driven initiative will foster dynamic creative content and the future development of interactive television. The main thrust behind these announcements has been these standards bodies adoption of the DVB-GEM (Globally Executable MHP) specification, which is at the core of MHP.

Up until now, the world has been dominated by a multitude of proprietary middleware systems and application developers are anxious to ensure that the advent of open middleware systems does not mean that they simply have yet another platform to target for their applications. DVB, by developing GEM, and the set of measures around it, has ensured that those organisations wishing to adopt MHP for non-DVB environments can now do so.

With market analysts predicting that by the end of 2005 there will be over 250 million iTV enabled homes around the world, harmonisation under a single platform is seen as a major breakthrough that will drive the success of iTV. Content that has a universal appeal and can be formatted to a single standard has a far greater degree of mobility and therefore a larger audience potential. The costs of producing such interactive content for a larger audience base progressively decreases. This results in a higher profitability for the given content, based on the premise that the greater the audience for a given content, the greater the revenue and lower costs.