MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION BROADCASTING USING DIGITAL TV CHANNELS

In this paper, the structure of a new system to broadcast multimedia i nformation within a digital TV channel is outlined. The proposed schem e is based on the DSM-CC functions, and uses a newly developed protoco l that allows to efficiently convey multimedia information. Such infor mation has the same characteristics of HTML files used in WWW environm ents, as it may contain text, images, sounds and animation organized a s an hypertext. The transport structure used is the MPEG-2 Transport S tream, which is the most popular standardized platform for the develop ment of new digital TV services. A prototype software was developed to encode the file system by means of DSM-CC operations and include it i n a MPEG-2 compatible Transport Stream.