When he selects a TV program for viewing, he enters the broadcast domain, and can also easily zap across different programs. While watching a program, he is able to ask complementary information, which means moving back to the Web to get the proper pages containing text, graphics, animations and so on. Controlling the playback of time-dependent contents, like streams of multiplexed audiovisual data, requires specific support. For example, the playback of a stream might synchronize the rendering of text subtitles and graphics animations. More advanced features might be required in specific contexts.
Standards are essential for delivering applications across heterogeneous platforms.
However, the bundle of concepts they share makes them suitable to convey EPG and similar Interactive TV applications to users. The efforts include development and testing of tools and applications to be used in the realm of new services, such as those that will emerge from the integration between TV and the Web. This contribution provides an outlook of the three major multimedia standards, and highlights the need of having an adequate authoring tool to generate compliant applications. It aims to bring synchronized multimedia to the Web without requiring expensive authoring tools. Features Using SMIL, authors can create a multimedia presentation in terms of layout, temporal behavior, and events associated to timers and anchor selections.