Project ALTATV

The Brazilian public television industry has started the migration to a digital terrestrial broadcast system, bringing as main benefits an better image quality with high resolution contents, as well as, an interactive system. Such interactive system brings opportunities to a whole set of new applications as banking services (t-banking), distance learning (t-learning), and electronic commerce (t-commerce).

The successful deployment of an interactive digital TV on Brazil rely over the dissemination of DTV receivers among the population. As such, the low cost of those equipments are essential to the penetration of the technology on all classes of brazilian society. Upon such scenario, the brazilian government formed a research consortium to explore the development of better and less expensive DTV receivers for the brazilian system (SBTVD).

In its first cycle, the consortium is focused on the development of a Free, Scalable DTV Receiver Architecture accordingly with the SBTVD standard. The proposed architecture will follow a roadmap elaborated by the consortium and will be deployed in three distinct scenarios: as an open-hardware project, based on the use of available commercial chipsets; as an open-software running on general purpose computers; and as a logical design of a system-on-a-chip (SoC).

The result of this first cycle will be available through an open web site and workshops available to the community. The proposed architecture, and its implementations, will be licensed under one or more of the following agreements: MIT, GPL and LGPL. With such approach we expect to allow a free and wide evolution of the digital TV receivers among all the levels of the society.