scope:

The present document is one in a series of Technical Specification documents produced by the TV-Anytime Forum. These documents establish the fundamental specifications for the services, systems and devices that will conform to the TV-Anytime standard, to a level of detail that is implementable for compliant products and services.

TS 102 822-1 [7] and TS 102 822-2 [8] set the context and system architecture in which the standards for Metadata, Content referencing, Bi-directional metadata and Metadata protection are to be implemented in the TV-Anytime environment. TS 102 822-1 [7] provides benchmark business models against which the TV-Anytime system architecture is evaluated to ensure that the specification enable key business applications. TS 102 822-2 [8] presents the TV-Anytime System Architecture. These first two documents are largely informative, while the remainder of the series is normative.

Although each in the series of documents is intended to stand alone, a complete and coherent sense of the TV-Anytime system standard can be gathered by reading all the specification documents in numerical order.

The metadata specifications TS 102 822-3-1 [9], TS 102 822-3-3[10], TS 102 822-3-4 [11], TS 102 822-8 [19] and TS 102 822-9 [20] address the description language, structure and semantics of TV-Anytime metadata descriptions. The present document introduces new network agnostic technologies used to process these descriptions for the purpose of transmission in a unidirectional environment.

The actual format and semantics of the delivery layer are specific to the particular uni-directional environment in which TV-Anytime is deployed. However, in order for the encoding and encapsulation mechanisms to operate as intended the delivery layer must meet certain requirements. These normative requirements are defined in annex B of TS 102 822-2 [8].