The number of electronic programme guides (EPGs) deployed in Europe by broadcasters, cable and satellite operators, set-top box and television manufacturers and others grows daily. The amount of information that they carry is growing at an even faster pace as digitalisation and other developments leads to more channels and hence to more programmes to be described in the guides.
The lack of standardisation in the area of television programme information (or television "metadata" as it is called) poses increasing problems right through the television value chain. Everybody loses, from programme-makers, broadcasters, advertisers and network operators to television viewers. It's not at all easy to produce programme information for each of the existing EPG formats. The net result is that the majority of programmes are far from well presented in EPGs.
This problem has been recognised for some time and three industry-wide initiatives have been undertaken to address it. The earliest was DVB-SI, which is an integral part of the digitalisation of television in Europe and other regions of the world. Two other especially promising television metadata standards that build on the precedent of DVB-SI will soon be finalised. TV-Anytime, the first of these, addresses the needs that arise from high volume low cost storage (e.g. Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and Video-on-Demand (VOD) services). The second, MPEG-7, is much broader in its scope, seeking to provide tools for describe all forms of multimedia content delivered by the broadest possible range of networks and terminals.
onTV sees improved use of DVB-SI as central to immediate action to achieve improved television metadata quality, and TV-Anytime as the key to the next generation of programme guides. onTV:meta , our television metadata management system, is based on these standards. Making use of the flexibility of XML and the descriptive power of our extended TV-Anytime Schema and its associated programme classification dictionaries, the system is readily able to generate programme information in legacy formats, as well as in the richer formats of the emerging open standards.