An educational component-based digital TV middleware for the brazilian's system

Abstract

One of the major problems faced by the Brazilian population is the low level of the fundamental schools. Television is the most popular source of entertainment and information of the Brazilian population being present in approximately 54 million families all over the country. These families watch television for more than 8 hours daily. Moreover, at this moment, the Brazilian TV system is moving from analog to digital. That means not only that image and sound will be delivered with much better quality but also that it will be possible to send interactive multimedia programs, creating a brand new way of watching TV. That is in fact the main novelty of the digital system it will be possible to offer personal interactive services such as banking, games and most importantly educational programs. This work introduces a software framework called "Extended Middleware for Digital TV (EMTV)" which is suitable for the generation of interactive applications executed over digital television systems. Its concept was developed focusing on the Brazilian technological options for Digital TV. Technically, EMTV is a procedural GEM compliant application which, from the programmer's point of view, acts as a declarative middleware extension. The framework was developed to be component-based in order to minimize the need for programming knowledge to deploy the digital TV applications using EMTV. The main goal of the platform is to facilitate the construction of interactive multimedia educational applications, a crucial field for the Brazilian population. The concept is tested and validated by the construction of a Quiz application presented at the end of the paper. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.