Interactive applications for the multimedia home platform

Interactive Digital TV offers a wide range of possibilities to enhance the interplay and mutual influence between the viewer, broadcaster and application provider. Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) is a standard that allows to develop interactive applications in a hardware platform independent way. In order to evaluate the usability and appropriateness of current MHP implementations, we developed an interactive application on basis of the MHP standard. Generally, the technology is mature, although some minor technical programs have to be solved. Currently no appropriate emulators for MHP applications are available, which leads to considerable costs for testing MHP applications, as the necessary hardware costs up to 80K Euro.