Within the last years, digital engineering takes bigger and bigger room in the field of broadcasting. Through the effort of digital technologies, new ways and possibilities for designing and broadcasting other forms of content (multimedia, interactivity) raise in parallel to the technical development. The so called program related information services are highly concerned by this general evolution. Videotext as a first example of such an information service is a purely text based system. New services on the other hand, for example DVB- (Digital Video Broadcasting) and DAB- (Digital Audio Broadcasting) data services allow the broadcaster to provide, multimedia content, based on linking together text, pictures, graphics, audio and video. The Internet world offers a broadcaster at the moment much more possibilities concerning multimedia than broadcast delivery mechanisms and is used in parallel to data broadcasting.

On account of the general evolution to a multimedia information society it is to be foreseen, that information and service offers, which have a multimedia-based character and exhaust the new technological possibilities, are highly demanded in future. ZDF as a broadcaster with an information-centered program took this development early into account and offers now a wide range of multimedia, program related supplementary services to the spectator. Here are to be named ZDF.online and heute.online in the Internet, ZDF Intercast (information hereto available in german or english)- a data broadcast service in the analog range - as well as the electronic program guide in the digital bouquet ZDF.vision. Under preparation is at present ZDF.digitext, an information service within ZDF.vision.

As a broadcaster, we have two different points of view, concerning the convergence of TV and the Web.

One is to broadcast Web-content via our existing networks. Actually, we are using the analogue PAL-TV-signal to broadcast HTML pages with the Intercast system provided by Intel. It is not only used for sending previously grabbed web-pages, but, what is much more interesting, the system allows to synchronize the schedule of the HTML-broadcast with the TV-program. New forms of programs were developped and a lot of experience was gained during the last year. The next step will be to implement a similiar system for broadcasting via digital transport-streams using DVB.

The other aspect of convergence is the possibilty of using the Internet as a new channel for program delivery. Our Internet services already offer video and audio using streaming technology available today. New offers could be realized with higher bitrates and better encoding algorithms, e.g. opening the huge video-archives for a video on demand service.

Alexander Braun, ZDF, braun.a@zdf.de