Helsinki Telephone Corporation (HPY) is the biggest of Finland’s 45 private telephone companies. Founded in 1882, it serves one fifth of the nation’s five million residents in it’s principal operating area in Helsinki.

Helsinki Telephone Corporation’s Research center has been active in application oriented research to create good basis for starting new services. It participates actively in the national and international standardization organizations with the Telecommunications Administration Center in Finland. In addition it is a principal member of the ATM Forum, Frame Relay Forum, DAVIC, IETF and W3C. HPY is also a member of ITU-T and ITU-R and participates in standardization work on the European level in ETSI and also in the research work in different EURESCOM- and EU projects.

In Finland the digital TV pilots will start during 1998 and it is estimated that commercial service could start around year 2000. Based on our position in Finnish telecommunication markets it is seen vital that our company becomes an active player in making digital TV- services possible. Because of this Helsinki Telephone Corporation’s Research center has applied for a membership in DVB and is also participating in FutureTV- projects with other Finnish content and service providers.

HPY’s main interest in W3C’s digital TV- work and in this workshop is in contributing and following the standardization work on the return channel. As a large telecommunication’s company it is in our interest to see either telephone network and ISDN or cable used as the return channel. The return channel is in may ways the most important part of digital TV. Our belief is that neither the new TV- channels nor better picture quality will make the customers buy new receivers. It is the new interactive services that will boost the rise of this new technology. On-demand, banking and home shopping services and internet access are just few most interesting ones that could make the customers interested in this change. And without a working return channel non of these services are possible.

Other areas of interest are the integration of TV content and Web content and user interface issues. At this time one of the biggest problems is that the internet pages shown on TV screen do not look good. The pages are designed for PC monitors and just showing them (without any conversion) on TV does not look very appealing. Also the new technologies (picture-in-picture and embedded hyperlinks) are very interesting. These technologies (if successfully implemented) will have a huge impact on customers willing in buying new receivers.

According to a recent study by Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications one of the most important issues is to develop a national user interface (UI) for digital TV. The UI should be impartial to all service providers. This way it would ensure that a correct picture of all available services is given to the customers. Another issue related to the UI is also the metadata associated to the content. New formats and standards are emerging, from which especially MPEG-7 seems to be quite promising. (HPY’s Research center is also involved in a national project studying the possibilities of MPEG-7.)

Markus Bäckström, Teemu Varonen

Helsinki Telephone Corporation / Research