Warner ten Kate Philips ResearchSUMMARY:
It is discussed how Multimedia are appearing in Internet and digital-TV broadcast. Where the Internet is proceeding along its own path of solutions, examples are RTSP, RTP, d-HTML and SMIL, the digital-TV world by way of DAVIC, has made its selection of technology choices: MPEG, DVB, DSM-CC and MHEG are examples of specified standards.
>From the perspective of television program making, a scenario how "Internet" could enhance digital-TV broadcast is presented. The scenario takes to the conclusion that "convergence" at the application level does not require automatically convergence of the supporting technology.
Our program at Philips Research is directed to such interoperability questions. In reference to a possible system architecture, interoperability will be discussed with respect to the SMIL and MHEG-5 presentation languages for specifying Multimedia applications.
The recently released SMIL language might become the Web's counterpart of what MHEG is to digital-TV. Both languages are summarized and compared. Translation approaches are slightly addressed (see also the paper on "Hypermedia Stylesheets" later in the course).