Participation in W3C Web on TV Workshop

Dear Committee of the Web on TV workshop,

Here we submit a statement of interest for the 1st Web on TV workshop.

Sincerely,


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Expression of interest in participating in the Workshop

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Name, organization and contact details
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Name: Shozo FUKUI
Organization: Tomo-Digi Corporation
E-mail: sfukui@tomo-digi.co.jp

Name:  Yosuke FUNAHASHI
Organization: Tomo-Digi Corporation
E-mail: yfuna@tomo-digi.co.jp


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Participant’s interest
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In Japan, BML (Broadcast Markup Language) Version 1.0 was published
in 1999 as a standard presentation language for digital television sets.
The language was standardized as a part of the Japanese digital
broadcasting system and has been used for years for various
bi-directional/interactive TV programs and social services since the
BS (Broadcasting Satellite) digital broadcasting service started in
2000.  BML is basically an extension for existing Web standards, e.g.,
XHTML 1.1, and has been modified for various (Japanese) broadcasting
services including 110-degree East Longitude CS Digital Broadcasting,
Digital Terrestrial Television, One-Seg (Mobile Terrestrial Digital
Audio/Video and Data Broadcasting), CATV (Cable Television) and IPTV
(Internet Protocol Television).

As of July, 2010, the number of household television sets in use is
already more than 80 million in Japan.  Since almost all digital TV sets
have BML browser capability, a universal service using BML is getting
realistic all over the land.  Now digital TVs are getting the center
of digital home networks, and it is expected that they will be used
not only as a receiver for digital broadcasting but also as a central
server for variety of entertainment and essential information for
everyday life.  Also it is strongly desired that TV sets will be
better integrated with Web technologies, e.g., HTML5 and get even
richer presentation capability.

We believe our knowledge and expertise on digital TV broadcasting
technology in Japan should be useful to this workshop and we should be
able to provide various use cases based on our long-term experience.
We are very interested in what kind of roles our expertise on digital
broadcasting would play in the context of Web standardization.


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Point of View
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1. TV devices and their resources
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One of the characteristics of BML (Broadcast Markup Language) is the
well-defined balance of compactness and capability which was designed
based on the long-term discussion by both broadcasters and appliance
vendors.  The BML specification was published in 1999, and at that
time hardware resources were much less powerful than today.  We would
like to (1) explain how BML tackled poor hardware resource issue, and
(2) provide some suggestions to the workshop discussion, e.g.,
consideration of extensibility for the future devices/environments.

2. Comparison between BML and HTML5
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We have been providing various broadcasting services based on BML
(Broadcast Markup Language) technology, and would like to show several
use cases which we believe should be discussed during this workshop.
We will explain the difference between BML and HTML5 as well.
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