If you thought shopping and banking through television is the high-end technology that can be had, you are in for a turn. Here, comes the television of the future, power-packed with features that will boggle one’s mind and make it a difficult choice to decide which type of technology one would like to identify with. Here, we present few up and coming technologies in television.

 

Convergence of PC and TV

 

Today’s internet speed connections reach up to 3 Mbps and with faster processors, movies and songs can be downloaded with greater speeds on a PC. Watching a movie on a 17” monitor of a PC is not much of an appeal, when you can watch the same movie on a 32” standard television screen. This is made possible with a PC to TV converter. The PC to TV converter connects the VGA port on the PC to the composite S-video component on the television. This brings out the video component on to the television. The audio component from PC to TV is brought about by connecting the 1/8” headphones jack on the PC to the RCA audio on the television. With such PC to TV convergence, one can not only watch downloaded movies, but also one can show elaborate slide shows of digital images, view home video on the television and also give a power point presentation from a PC/laptop on a television[1].

 

Wireless TV

 

We are able to watch programs on a television, broadcast from a TV station far away, because of wires connecting the television in our home to the antenna, cable or a set-top box. Now with wireless technology, one can watch television “placed just about anywhere in the house, without the need for a wired antenna, cable or satellite box connection[2]”.

 

The first wireless TV, the Sharp AquosLC-15L1U-S was developed in 2004 by the Sharp Company. Sharp uses the 802.11b standard for transmission. This comes with a 15” LCD flat panel, stand and built-in speakers, remote and a base-station. When an antenna, a cable TV box, a DVD player or a VCR are connected to the base-station, one can watch video content from any of these sources from anywhere in the house, or outdoors, as long as the television is in the wireless range. The Sharp wireless TV is priced at $1300. Following is the Sharp AquosLC-15L1U-S Wireless TV[3].

Another company which came up with the wireless TV is Sony. Sony’s LocationFree TV, LF-X1 has a 12.1” LCD screen with a base-station and an IR blaster system. Sony also uses the 802.11b wireless standard. To the base-station one can connect audio/video equipments like DVD, cable box and control it through the IR blaster. The base station also has an Ethernet port to connect the TV into home network and an USB port to connect to a printer. This enables one to surf the internet with the built-in browser and simultaneously access multimedia content from one’s hard drive. Sony differs from Sharp’s wireless TV in that, with the Sony LF-X1, one can watch cable or satellite feed from any location that has broadband internet access, whether wired or wireless. This literally means, that sitting in New York, one can watch programs streamed from a set-top box in San Diego. The Sony LF-X1 is priced at $1,499. Following is the Sony’s LocationFree TV, LF-X1 [4].

 

 Java TV API

            The Java TV application programming interface API is being designed to provide access to functionality unique to digital television receivers. The Java TV (API) is an extension of the Java platform.

It includes:

  • Audio/video streaming
  • Conditional access
  • Access to in-band and out-of-band data channels
  • Access to service information
  • Tuner control for channel changing
  • On-screen graphics control

In addition, the Java TV API is being designed to provide additional functionality in the form of media synchronization and control of the application life-cycle. Media synchronization will allow interactive television content to be synchronized with the underlying video and background audio of a television program. Application life-cycle control will enable content to coexist gracefully with television programming content such as commercials. The Java TV API is intended to deliver interactive content securely to consumers via cable set-top boxes, satellite receivers, and digital televisions [5].

Figure 1 depicts the hardware and software Units for the Java TV API when implemented on a digital television receiver.

                            Figure 1: Typical Software Stack on a Digital TV Receiver

Software Unit:-

The software unit consists of the Java platform and the Java TV API, typically on top of a real-time operating system (RTOS).

At the highest level of the software unit, an application developed for a television receiver can use the Java TV API and the class libraries in the underlying Java platform. These libraries enable television content developers to offer consumers interactive television content such as enhanced television, video-on-demand (VOD), electronic programming guides (EPGs), and viewer selection of multiple camera angles, in broadcasts of sporting events.

At the lowest level, the RTOS and related device-specific libraries control the hardware through a collection of device drivers. The RTOS provides the system-level support needed to implement the Java virtual machine and class libraries that compose the Java platform. The Java TV API encapsulates the functionality exposed by the system libraries that control the hardware, so that developers can focus on their applications rather than on device-specific details [5].

Hardware Unit:-

The Java TV API operates within the hardware context of a television receiver. The defining feature of a television receiver, digital or analog, is the existence of a broadcast medium and a data pipeline. This pipeline typically has certain commonly understood features, or subsystems, such as a tuner and a demultiplexor. The Java TV API provides a layer of abstraction that allows the application programmer to take advantage of the underlying television hardware while ignoring device-specific details[5].

 MobiTV :-

 Now a days We have PDA phones, MP3 phones, and camera phones. New technology introduced in the field of television, is  MobiTV ,a surprisingly effective, affordable, and appealing service This technology  gives us TV phones.  Although other non–calling functions on digital phones may leave you bored or unimpressed after your initial enthusiasm, this hot application might turn out to is a bigger success than the other applications combined [6].“The digital video signals are compressed and formatted to fit the small screens of mobile handsets by MobiTV. The user requests and accesses the MobiTV servers over the public Internet to obtain access to the mobile TV content. The digitally encoded video frames are then sent in IP packets over the public Internet directly to the user’s handset, using the mobile’s carrier network for the "last leg". The mobile subscriber communicates directly with the MobiTV servers over the public Internet as is done in typical Internet client-server applications. No additional hardware or software is required on the networks of the mobile carriers to offer the service. The mobile TV access and delivery processes are essentially the same as the video streaming technology that has been in use for many years over wireline Internet connections. Essentially, the role of the mobile carrier’s network in delivering mobile TV services is similar to the role played by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) network in a typical Internet application such as video streaming”[7].

 

 

                                                     Figure 1 – Implementation of Mobile TV

Figure 1 highlights the functions performed by the MobiTV Reach TV Platform managing the upstream request from the end user to the MobiTV server and the downstream response from the server to the end user[7].

 

[1] http://sewelldirect.com/connecting-your-pc-to-your-tv.asp

[2] http://hometheater.about.com/b/a/025158.htm