CPA for the MHP

Welcome to the home page of the MHP Cross-platform Authoring Project, this site is intended to provide interested parties with detailed information about the project's conception, its day-to-day progress and the end result.

The project is being run as part of the University of Warwick Computer Science degree programme course CS310 and will make up 30% of the students marks for their final year.

The project was inspired by work undertaken at the BBC's Research and Development Lab, Kingswood Warren, during the summer of 2002, it was here that the current interactive TV (iTV) market place was made clear.

In the UK there are three competing platforms for digital television each operates a different standard for interactive content:

As the BBC is funded by the license payer it is obliged to provide the same service to the viewing public on each of these platforms. This becomes more difficult with iTV as the same services must be created three times. Currently three seperate teams of developers are employed to do just this, this trebles the cost of service creation.

Now deployed as a means of generating iTV applications for national broadcase BBC's the Cross-Platform Authoring (CPA) team have developed a system which allows the generic specification of iTV services in XML. This specification is then passed through the CPA tool and produces output for the three differnt types of set-top box (DSat, DCable and DTT) the service is then displayed on three TV's.

This Project

The aim of this project is to extend the CPA tool to ouput to MHP which is a recently ratified iTV standard to be used in Australia, Brazil, California and The Netherlands.