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Those of you with Freeview receivers may have noticed a new service has launched on the platform in the last week; it's called VuTV, and is what I've been working on for the last while. It's a pay TV service offering a variety of channels (see its website for more info); what makes it different to, say, Top Up TV, is that only the portal into the service is broadcast: the channels you subscribe to are delivered via your home Internet (but of course shown on your TV, not your computer or other devices). At present there's only an all-or-nothing subscription package, but the ability to subscribe on a per-channel basis is in the offing, I believe.
The part I've been involved in is the client-side—in plain language the computer code running on your television or set-top-box, which accepts remote control keypresses, shows all the text and graphics (including an EPG), checks the viewer is properly logged in, and fetches the correct video streams over the Internet for the TV to show to the viewer. It's is written in MHEG-5 (my speciality!), the language used on Freeview and Freesat STBs, which has received a new lease of life with the ability to perform such video streaming. (Older Freeview boxes could not connect to the Internet.)
Building the service was of course a team effort, as everything is nowadays; I was the principal coder on the project, but it builds on a substantial prior codebase of which I was only one of several to contribute.
Do have a look at the service, but be warned only a few TVs and STBs can gain access to it as yet; we expect this number to grow as more TV manufacturers let us know their products are capable of supporting the service.
The part I've been involved in is the client-side—in plain language the computer code running on your television or set-top-box, which accepts remote control keypresses, shows all the text and graphics (including an EPG), checks the viewer is properly logged in, and fetches the correct video streams over the Internet for the TV to show to the viewer. It's is written in MHEG-5 (my speciality!), the language used on Freeview and Freesat STBs, which has received a new lease of life with the ability to perform such video streaming. (Older Freeview boxes could not connect to the Internet.)
Building the service was of course a team effort, as everything is nowadays; I was the principal coder on the project, but it builds on a substantial prior codebase of which I was only one of several to contribute.
Do have a look at the service, but be warned only a few TVs and STBs can gain access to it as yet; we expect this number to grow as more TV manufacturers let us know their products are capable of supporting the service.
