Design of an interactive application for digital terrestrial television based on Ginga Middleware for marketing online products

Abstract

The introduction of digital terrestrial television (DTT) brings multiple advantages. On the one hand, there are those advantages that allow optimizing the use of the radioelectric spectrum, such as (i) the possibility of transmitting in adjacent channels, (ii) transmission of multiple contents through the same radio channel, and (iii) the use of single frequency networks (SFN). On the other hand, another advantage, not fully exploited, is to offer interactive content and value-added services, such as learning (T-Learning), voting (T‑Voting), commerce (T-Commerce), etc. In ISDB-Tb interactivity, using the GINGA middleware developed in Brazil is possible. In Ecuador, ISDB-Tb was adopted as a DTT standard in 2010. Nowadays, and despite having passed several years, the implementation of ISDB-Tb in Ecuador is still in its early stages. Therefore, none of its most important features has yet been exploited. This article presents the design of an interactive application that allows products to be commercialized through DTT. The application design was developed in Ginga-J to allow security options. In addition, the company's database was created in MySQL with an APACHE server. The application enables the user to pay by credit card or by PAYPAL. Digital certificates and signatures were included to encode the information, protect the data, and verify the identity of both parties, making the purchase a safe process. Using digital signatures prevents the company from storing user financial data or making a fraudulent transaction, and vice versa. User acceptance tests (UAT) determined that the application is practical, the content is organized and understandable, and its handling is like purchasing online. Finally, the investment is verified with a discount on the balance of the user's account.