MX Telecom Interactive Television Platform

Contents

• Overview
• Interactive TV Client
• Interactive TV Client Broadcast Edition
• Interactive TV Client Terminal Edition
• Interactive TV Server
• Interactive TV Web Interface
• Account Setup

Overview

MX Telecom provides its customers with unified interfaces to the full spectrum of modern telecommunication, from SMS and MMS to Voice and Video. For those wishing to couple the interactive potential of these gateway platforms with the unique medium of television, MX Telecom offers the MX Telecom Interactive Television Platform. MX Telecom provides a range of turnkey video overlay hardware platforms which render a flexible rich visual experience for distributed mobile/broadcast applications, fully configurable using a comprehensive web-based administration system.

The use of mobile handsets for interactivity in television programming eliminates the need to own or use any custom interactive television hardware, and also allows viewers to interact with screens in public areas such as shops, sports stadiums, hotels, licensed premises and airports. If provisioned with MMS and 3G Video, the end user has unprecedented scope for participating in the programming beyond current 'red-button' interactive technology. The provider can employ the full range of mobile revenue stream technologies to directly bill end users for use of the service.

Example uses of the MX Interactive TV Platform include:

• Automated Text- and MMS-to-screen solutions
• Moderated text chat television channels, with MMS avatars
• Live integration of 3G video calls with programming
• Complete 'TV Station in a Box' solutions, including:
• Scheduled video programming
• Randomized video jukebox programming
• Fully interactive gameshows, such as quizzes, using SMS for audience participation
• Distributed gameplay for networks of Interactive TV kiosk terminals

The platform itself is broken down into three components: the Interactive TV Client, the Interactive TV Server and the Interactive TV Admin Website.

Interactive TV Client

The MX Interactive TV Client is the frontline of the platform - a dedicated appliance for overlaying dynamically generated templates and video over an existing feed (if any). It is available in two main profiles - Broadcast Edition and Terminal Edition. The Interactive TV Client uses animation templates authored in industry standard Open SWF format (as used by Macromedia Flash) to render alpha-transparent overlays in real-time, with a huge range of possible visual effects. The video output uses a dedicated SWF renderer designed for realtime television standards as opposed to computer displays. Templates can be authored by designers using any standard SWF authoring package such as Macromedia Flash MX. The renderer does not support client-side ActionScript beyond basic SWF version 3 graphical flow of control, as the 'business logic' of the applications runs on the Interactive TV Server platform for ease of integration with MX Telecom's gateway products, and ease of support for distributed gameplay.

The client can also display prerecorded broadcast content, and integrate streams from live sources such as 3G video calls.

Example templates include:

Interactive TV Client: Broadcast Edition

The Broadcast Edition of the MX Interactive TV Client is a dedicated chargen/overlay appliance which operates on a standard definition SDI (BT.656) digital feed. It overlays fully television-standard aware broadcast-quality dynamic content using SWF templates, and can also display broadcast quality MPEG video and live feeds from webcasts and live 3G video calls. It is intended to conceptually be placed in the post-production pipeline alongside Aston, Quantel and similar equipment. The graphical design of the product is determined using a SWF authoring package such as Macromedia Flash MX.

The client integrates with MX Telecom gateway products by either a VPN or dedicated leased line, and is administered using the Interactive TV Web Interface using this connectivity. Precise hardware specification is flexible depending on the customer's needs.

Interactive TV Client: Terminal Edition

The Terminal Edition of the MX Interactive TV Client shares the same core functionality with the Broadcast Edition, but is a more generic platform intended for low-cost kiosk devices, and operates on consumer video standards (Composite, S-Video, analog RGB or DVI). It has additional features for mass-deployment for distributed gameplay and remote administration, such as bulk-provisioning.

Interactive TV Server

The Interactive TV Clients are controlled by a hosted server platform (the MX Interactive TV Server), which runs a state-of-the-art modular application platform implemented in Java. The Interactive TV Server binds together our various telecommunication gateways (SMS, MMS, IVR and 3G Video) and the TV Clients to create the end solution. The platform is fully scalable, and can bind many TV Clients (typically Terminal Edition clients) together into a single distributed application. An example might be two bars, each with their own terminal displaying its own templates and content, yet both displaying SMS messages sent in by consumers at both venues. Alternatively multiple screens in a large venue might be powered each by a separate Terminal Edition Client, each capable of displaying different content if necessary - but also sharing other content when required.

Interactive TV Web Interface

MX Telecom hosts a whitelabelled web interface for controlling and monitoring both the TV Server and Clients. Highlights include a Flash user interface for scheduling instances of applications for clients or groups of clients, and HTML components for configuring the application instances with all the data and behaviour they require to operate.

Example Client administration page: