Web Browsers

One of the most difficult issues to deal with in the development of an API for digital television is the provision of a web browser for internet surfing. It is difficult for several reasons:

  1. The viewing experience is different, with the majority of viewers sitting on the other side of the romm to the screen (the so-called "lean back" environment) and an interlaced scan display. This significantly limits the amount of content that can be displayed on a single screen.
  2. Also, the client software must be tiny by pc standards. A set-top box API normally runs in 2 + 2 (Mbytes of flash and RAM memory). 4 + 4 is a luxury.
  3. Internet protocols are immature. The language is evolving at a stunning rate and to manage that rate of change in a set-top box environment would be unthinkable.

Up till now, the approach has been to implement the so-called 'walled garden' environment, where the user logs onto a special ISP (internet service provider), whose server translates requested content on-the-fly to make it suitable for the set-top box. WebTV was the first example of this approach. This solves all three problems in one go - upgrades can be performed on the broadcaster's server without any change to the viewer's box - and it also has the advantage (?) of locking the viewer onto the broadcaster host. However, this is not the only model and many take the view that the set-top box browser should have the same freedoms as the pc. So the quest is on for a micro-browser without the bloatware of pc browsers.

It is not just the set-top box industry that has this ambition - the mobile phone industry want to put visual content onto their tiny screens, a far greater problem in some ways. With the bubble of success driving them, it is likely that ready-made solutions from their industry could be applied to the set-top box much quicker than starting from scratch. Microsoft is pushing Windows CE as the operating system for mobile phones as well as set-top boxes and Sun have their HotJava microbrowser - both familiar names to the API developer.

But there are others which may be worth looking into. AOL / Netscape have a microbrowser called Gecko; 3Com have recently acquired French company Smartcode Technologies that has a microbrowser product and UK based STNC also has its HitchHiker microbrowser. Ericsson has a mobile phone running with the Symbian operating system and HitchHiker, though Symbian recently brought Sun into its partnership to add the flexibility of Java to its offering.

So there is a real prospect of acquiring a ready-made application as a hand-me-down from mobile phone developers.