ActiveTV

MediaMall's ActiveTV is software that installs on Windows PC's, and that communicates with partner ActiveTV set-top boxes and televisions to bring Internet video content to your TV. We work closely with a number of device companies to integrate ActiveTV technology, so that tons of great media content available on the Web can be consumed directly at the television. ActiveTV brings a rich PC-powered user interface to the TV, showing special "10-foot" TV-webpages, designed specifically for consumption on the television, from a variety of content providers. It allows for flexible development of new content sites, and leverages the processing power of the PC, helping keep the devices simpler and cheaper.

Currently, you can find ActiveTV on the market on the D-Link DSM-520. More products integrating ActiveTV are coming to market soon. Check back here often for updates. If your company is interested in incorporating ActiveTV technology in your media device, please don't hesitate to contact us.

How it Works

The MediaMall ActiveTV product consists of two primary components: A Windows PC application, and a thin client embedded (device) application. Although most all of the end-user experience takes place interacting directly with the embedded application, the vast majority of logic, processing, and functionality takes place "invisibly" on the PC as a background process. The PC application can install on most any Windows XP or Vista PC or notebook (including XP Home, XP Pro, XP MCE, XP Tablet, Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate, and Vista Business), while the thin client application is portable to most any embedded environment, consuming approximately 100kB in storage space.

The thin client application is designed as an application "plug-in" library, so that the MediaMall experience can be included as a feature within the device's overall user experience. It has been ported to Linux and Windows CE environments, and is compliant with any POSIX based OS. It is intended as an "add-on" to a device's already existing TCP/IP Networking, UPnP, and MediaRendering capabilities, and simply presents a window into the application running on the PC by sending key strokes and receiving screen updates from the PC. The PC application, in turn, browses either the world wide web, or any locally resident web application on the PC. In this way, both the device and the web application need only communicate directly with the PC using well known and robust protocols, formats, and development tools, thereby reducing implementation complexity for each device to be compatible with each TV-Website.

Architecturally, the MediaMall application on the PC acts as a web browser, a UPnP Control Point, a UPnP and HTTP server, a media download engine, (DRM) transcryption engine , media transcoding engine, and a UI Remoting server and session manager. All outside communication is done via the browsing and media processing components of the PC application, and only the necessary commands and media streams are forwarded along to the device over UPnP.

If you would like to learn more about the ActiveTV product, please don't hesitate to contact us at bizdev@themediamall.com to discuss your needs and how MediaMall can enhance your digital media products and platforms. If you would like to download a copy of MediaMall's PC software, click here.