• What is MHEG? •

MHEG-5 for Interactive Television

MHEG-5 is an open standard middleware solution – or application programme interface (API) – designed specifically for low-cost memory constrained devices particularly suited for digital interactive TV (iTV) services and is platform agnostic.

MHEG-5 was initially adopted in 1998 by ONDigital in the United Kingdom (rebranded as ITV Digital) for use in the world’s first pay-TV digital terrestrial television (DTT) network. ONDigital lead the industry wide specification and development task of the first MHEG-5 profile which subsequently (after the collapse of ITVDigital) formed the basis for deployment of interactive services on the UK DTT platform (Freeview).

MHEG-5 is now a mature technology and is deployed in the UK in over 23 million receivers with promising take-up in New Zealand and various other emerging markets / platforms (refer to MHEG-5 markets section).

UK Profile

The MHEG-5 UK Profile version 1.06 (or its ETSI equivalent, officially known as ETSI ES 202184 V1.1.1, 2004 MHEG-5 Broadcast Profile) provides a baseline specification that can, and has been, extended for other MHEG deployments worldwide. Commonly known as the UK Profile, it is the father of all MHEG-5 profiles and most commercially available products (or solutions) are based on this profile. All newer MHEG-5 profiles such as the FreeView NZ DTH and DTT profiles, or the TVB Hong Kong profile are based on the UK Profile 1.06 or its ETSI equivalent (refer to MHEG-5 Roadmap section).

The UK Digital TV Group (DTG) act as the custodians of the UK Profile and lead the specification and development tasks of all matters related to MHEG-5 in the UK. Please refer to the DTG website for the latest information on the UK MHEG-5 profile, corrigenda and interoperability issues.

History

MHEG is an acronym for the Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Expert Group (MHEG) originally developed and standardised by Working Group 12 (WG12) of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) - officially known as ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG12. It was developed in the mid 1990s as part of the DAVIC (Digital Audio Video Council) standardisation effort to support interactivity and navigation of multimedia services on various small footprint devices.

WG12 issued a suite of documents (MHEG parts 1 to 8) as part of the MHEG standard covering extensions for scripting language (MHEG-6), testing and interoperability (MHEG-7) and support for encodings in XML format (MHEG-8).

However, it is Part 5 of the standard, officially known an ISO/IEC 13522-5, or more commonly know as MHEG-5 that is of primary relevance to interactive digital television.