c-TWO WAY

With the popularity and exponential growth of the interactive television market, Corpus Media Labs offers the return path solution for building a comprehensive iTV platform to help DTH operators deliver interactive application services to its customers. In a growth segment, where the directions are driven by customer demands, it is essential that, together with market research and adoption, the technology that delivers the services must be advanced, adaptive, and flexible.

Corpus Return Path Solution delivers an iTV Enterprise platform capable of meeting these challenges.

Return Path (also called Return Channel/Back Channel) provides a mechanism where subscriber can interact with their service provider by clicking on STB remote. It is the physical way that the end-user (viewer) is able to send information, requests and/or demands back to the network operator. A return path is a 2-way communications link between the TV viewer and the interactive content provider.

The return path solution is a critical sub-system of the enterprise iTV architecture. Its primary responsibility is to act as the interface between the STB application and the Interactive application servers (either of third party or those provided by Operator).

The return path infrastructure is divided into 2 major elements.

1. The Online STB: To obtain an IP address for the STB and access connectivity to the internet. There are various ways to establish a return path channel for the STB to be online, but the most preferred option is a broadband based return path channel. (PPP, DVBRC, DOCSIS, ETHERNET)
2. The Return Path Solution: To support the on-line activities of the STB on IP based back channel.
   
   

RPS Business cases

A connected STB can support a wide range of true interactive applications. Some of the business cases include.

• Audience measurement system.
• Customer profiling & Recommendations
• True VOD applications.
• Network Personal Video Recording (nPVR).
• Interactive TV Applications:
• Instant Service activation
• Distance Learning
• Quiz, Poll/Vote applications, program/user tips
• JobsTV (Specific Jobs portal features on TV)
• Shopping on TV
• Search and reminder services for TV programs
• Catch up TV apps
• Integrated YouTube application on TV
• Gambling & games (Multiplayer games)
• Message Delivery platform
• Music-on-Demand (MoD), Karaoke
• Walled Garden Internet Access
• TV e-Commerce (T-Commerce)
• Peripheral support

Corpus Return Path Solution Features

The Corpus return path solution features are broadly classified in to 2 categories

• The Core features to support the return path infrastructure
• Add-ons to the Return path infrastructure for building true interactive applications

Core Features :

• Online STB
  • To obtain an IP address for the STB and access connectivity to the internet
  • To support the on-line activities of the STB on IP based back channel
  • To establish connectivity with the back end infrastructure. The RPS to provide an interface for the STB applications to establish a communication channel with backend systems
• Identification and authentication of the STB and connections generated from the STB.
• To Provide communication transport from the STB to / from Third party application server and other internal systems
• To manage sessions for each and every application specific request processing
• To proxy HTTP Requests and Transaction Management
• To provide interface for configuring the entire system.
• Logging, monitoring, reporting and generating statistics of online activities
• To provide interface to Internal systems for micro-billing service for premium rate applications
• To facilitate a secure communication channel between the STB and the backend systems by providing adequate security and encryption mechanism..
• Compress the data that flows between the STB and the backend systems in order to reduce the bandwidth consumption and for adequate memory management by the STB.
• To keep track of bandwidth uses by the STB and to generate adequate reports on the usage.
• To provide a mechanism to deliver push messages from various application services to the STB..
• To provide a highly scalable and highly available system..