Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

Abstract

Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system.