Interactive TV Standards

9 Reading Service Information

Service information (SI) is the mechanism that lets a receiver know about the channels and shows available on a DTV network. Here, we will discuss the APIs that MHP and OCAP applications can use to read this information, and look at the differences in SI between the two platforms. Because these APIs are such a central part of the middleware, we will also look at SI from the middleware perspective and discuss how we can build the most efficient and reliable implementation of these APIs.

For a DTV system, SI serves three purposes. The first of these is to tell the receiver what services are contained in that transport stream and how they are organized. The second purpose is to tell the receiver how the rest of the ...