Pluggable iTV Receiver Virtual Machine Interface
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing TV receivers struggle to support multiple interactive television (iTV) standards and proprietary implementations, limiting their ability to interface with different virtual machines and provide consistent programming services across various platforms.
Innovation Solution
A TV receiver with a plug-in architecture that detects and supports various iTV standards by loading matching virtual machines and providing common application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing easy extension to additional standards and proprietary implementations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If a TV receiver is designed to support multiple iTV standards with dedicated virtual machines for each standard, then the ability to interface with different virtual machines is improved, but the device complexity increases due to requiring multiple standard-specific components
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal virtual machine interface that can handle multiple iTV standards (MHEG, BML, MHP, OCAP) through a single standardized API layer. This allows the TV receiver to support diverse virtual machines without requiring separate interface implementations for each standard, thereby improving adaptability while controlling complexity through standardization.
2Ease of operation
If a TV receiver uses standardized virtual machine interfaces for iTV standards, then the ease of operation is improved, but the adaptability to proprietary iTV implementations deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary layer consisting of standardized APIs that sit between the proprietary iTV implementations and the virtual machines. This intermediary translation layer allows proprietary implementations to communicate with virtual machines through standardized interfaces, maintaining ease of operation while enabling adaptability to proprietary formats through the mediating translation capability.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques are disclosed herein that provide a TV receiver that supports a set of existing iTV standards and proprietary iTV implementations. Further, the TV receiver can be extended to support additional iTV standards and proprietary iTV implementations. A digital television data stream is received and processed by a client. The digital television data stream is analyzed to determine which interactive television format is present. A registry of interactive television virtual machines is searched to determine whether a virtual machine is registered for the interactive television format. Each of the interactive television virtual machines is adapted for one of the interactive television formats. If a virtual machine that matches the interactive television format is found, it is loaded and hosted. Hosting the virtual includes providing services to the virtual machine through common application programming interfaces (APIs) machine includes. The common APIs may be used by any virtual machine that is loaded.