OpenCable™ — Enhanced Television (ETV)
The CableLabs Enhanced Television project was initiated in early 2004 to provide a technical solution for ETV on legacy thin-client cable receivers. For more advanced devices, and retail devices, see OpenCable at opencable.com.
Enhanced television programming (ETV) is programming with an associated interactive software application. An application is delivered with a program, and its lifespan is tied to viewing of a program. Examples include voting contestants off a game show or purchasing an item from an advertisement.
Benefits
ETV enables programmer-driven interactivity for the most popular linear broadcasts across all cable systems on existing, deployed digital set-top boxes.
Benefits accrue to:
Enhanced TV is video programming that has an interactive application bound to it and which executes concurrently with that program. A user agent on the set-top box interprets ETV binary commands received via an in-band stream. Both native user agents on legacy digital set-top boxes as well as Java user agents on OCAP receivers are supported. The specifications are intended to provide a national cable footprint for ETV content.
Services and Applications Enabled
The advanced interactive cable services and applications enabled by ETV include:
Enhanced television programming (ETV) is programming with an associated interactive software application. An application is delivered with a program, and its lifespan is tied to viewing of a program. Examples include voting contestants off a game show or purchasing an item from an advertisement.
Benefits
ETV enables programmer-driven interactivity for the most popular linear broadcasts across all cable systems on existing, deployed digital set-top boxes.
Benefits accrue to:
- Customers—More choice, more entertainment, more control.
- Programmers—Grows current business models and enables new on-demand opportunities.
- Cable MSOs—Allows MSOs to leverage their secure, two-way, on-demand broadband architecture.
Enhanced TV is video programming that has an interactive application bound to it and which executes concurrently with that program. A user agent on the set-top box interprets ETV binary commands received via an in-band stream. Both native user agents on legacy digital set-top boxes as well as Java user agents on OCAP receivers are supported. The specifications are intended to provide a national cable footprint for ETV content.
Services and Applications Enabled
The advanced interactive cable services and applications enabled by ETV include:
- Interactive applications tied to a particular program stream. This includes voting and polling applications.
- Video-on-demand (VOD); the customer can respond to a prompt while watching a particular channel to purchase and view a VOD offering.
- Advertising; the customer can respond to an on-screen prompt to launch an advertisement stored as a VOD asset.