TABLE OF CONTENTS Chandy Nilakantan, Kishore Manghnani, Scott Johnson
Jerry C. Whitaker, Editor-in-Chief
The Internet is not just ubiquitous, its use for conducting commerce has become pervasive. Great strides have been made in the areas of providing widespread connectivity, increased capacity for moving richer content and adequate security for maintaining privacy. One of the largest remaining challenges is scalability particularly for distributing and delivering mixed media content to large numbers of locations and users in a predictable and efficient manner. The Internet has proven to be a great transaction network but falls woefully short when it comes to delivering services to even moderately sized communities or subscriber bases. On the other hand, present-day broadcast infrastructures, satellite, cable, and terrestrial networks possess built-in scalability and have the means to deliver broadband services to communities of any size, spread over any geography, very effectively.
Although the Internet and television are viewed on similar video display devices, the difference between them remains profound [1]. The concept of convergence of these mediums is often misunderstood or overplayed. The Internet remains an interactive (2-way) medium carrying largely static content for point-to-point distribution. Meanwhile, television remains a primarily one-way medium with dynamic content distributed in point-to-multipoint fashion.
Interactive television (ITV) is often considered the true convergence point between these systems, but in fact, it can be more accurately viewed as adapting certain features of each service to create a new hybrid medium. ITV takes the rich, dynamic content of television and adds to it...
