Summary

The objective of the Jules Verne project is to address the issues of matching the capabilities of the interactive digital broadcast industry for content creation to the capabilities of future home terminals (STB and IDTV). Currently the content creation industry is faced with new unproven business model(s) for interactive TV with little support or tools for effective and efficient content creation flows. Terminal vendors are currently addressing the market with limited capability terminals to reduce costs. These are terminals that can create minimal cash flows from standard services (Pay-TV using OpenTV or MHEG5), but have limited capabilities to create new business models (i.e. failed Triple-play of the European cable industry).

Support for the wider deployment of IDTV across Europe has been made by the introduction of network partners from the satellite and cable industries. These will provide policy and strategy input for the content and terminal vendors roadmaps, and a platform for demonstration of new interactive and object oriented channels via high bandwidth channels for home and communal services, both for urban and non-urban areas.

The European industry has terminal vendors with the potential to create very advanced terminals using established open standards (MHP-Java) and emerging standards for object oriented TV media (MPEG-4, MPEG-7and MPEG-21). Such advanced terminals could offer functionality comparable to a PC, or an advanced gaming platform such as Xbox. However, it is unclear if future TV broadcast business models can support the deployment of such an advanced terminal in vertical networks, or the customer will be attracted to such (high priced alternatives) terminals in horizontal markets. To bridge the gap between content generation and future terminals, this project will attempt to benchmark the capabilities of future content generation capabilities and provide a consensus on the growth of these capabilities as a roadmap. This roadmap will include related tools and capabilities for content generation, middleware, web services and terminals. Specifically the capabilities offered by Java, Flash, MPEG4 and MPEG7 as broadcast formats in the context of IP based Web services needs to be examined. This roadmap will then be used to create reference specification for advanced (Java) terminals using MHP and flexible middleware configurations.