Tél. : +33 2 99 12 45 81 - Fax international : +33 2 99 12 40 98

Email : pierreyves.castellan@cnet.francetelecom.fr

GIE CNET et TDF : CCETT
4, rue du Clos-Courtel; BP 59; F-35512 Cesson-Sévigné Cedex

France Telecom is preparing the introduction to the interactive multimedia information services.

The CCETT (France Telecom research Lab) and the Interactive Terminals Unit at LEP (Philips research lab) have established for more than two years now a collaborative work on the specification and the development of interactive TV terminals (STB). LEP is thus providing STBs for the France Telecom experimentation on information superhighways, and in particular for the Jasmin project. This latter is targeting the provision of different services on TV, from the traditional broadcast services to the video on demand, near-video on demand and Internet services. The work is following the DAVIC specifications. The project is currently in its integration phase.

Three application engines have been integrated :

• an HTML browser for the basic user interface and the access to the Internet,
• a MHEG engine for the provision of audio-visual-oriented applications (e.g. EPG),
• a Java virtual machine for the execution of scripts called by MHEG or Java applications downloaded from distant application servers.

The HTML browser is the interface to the other application engines. From it, the user can gain access to audio-visual MHEG or Java applications. Our development experience in this field as well as our closed collaboration with content providers and application developers enable us to assess the behaviour of those engines based on criteria such as :

• performance,
• suitability to the embedded environment (ease of integration, memory and CPU constraints),
• advantages and weakness with respect to the targeted services.

Jasmin project aims at providing open systems as opposed to proprietary systems (i.e mediahighway for Canal+, OpentTV for TPS, etc). That is why the STB specifications are following the DAVIC ones.

In this perspective, the work carried out by the W3C on the integration of multimedia content on the web is of high interest to us. We are also very interested in integration and synchronisation of Digital TV content and Web content. The development of interactive service on TV set will be improved by using the high bit-rate available on broadcast network and the widely used of HTML.