Interactive Television

Interactive Television

Staff at Tiger Computer Services have been involved in various interactive television projects, and provide consultancy on interactive and enhanced television including integration with broadcast television equipment.

We have built an understanding of all the major interactive platforms, such as OpenTV, Liberate (both NTL and Telewest), MHEG for DTT, Microsoft TV and Microsoft NT embedded. This includes both the set-top box middleware as well as the head-end systems used to broadcast the in-band data. We also have an understanding of DVD and MPEG transport streams.

Sky Sports Active

Within the Broadcast Computing department at BSkyB, we were involved with the development of the systems behind Sky Sports Active, including linking live match statistics from the outside broadcast trucks, which then generated automated graphics for one of eight broadcast video streams. Sky Sports Active provides a hybrid solution for interactive television, with eight broadcast video channels supported by PC based broadcast graphics systems combining with the set-top box application to provide the viewer experience.

Sky News Active

For Sky News, systems were created to automate the publishing of weather graphics, finance information and viewer vote graphics. MPEG-2 I-Frame stills were created from data provided by the Meteorological Office and Reuters finance systems. The systems were automated to reduce overheads, and the experience allowed the creation of tools to create one-off stills for use on the service, captured from off air broadcast or external web sites such as picture libraries.

SmashedAtom (Flextech, Bloomberg, BT OpenWorld, Front Row)

Staff at Tiger Computer Services Ltd were involved in developing responses to various Request For Proposals (RFP), for various companies including Flextech television, Bloomberg, BT OpenWorld and Front Row. This required defining content structures and goals for the interactive services, as well as designing the system architecture for the services, including the integration of broadcast video equipment with the relevant set top box (STB) middleware.