An Architecture to Emulate Television Receivers

Abstract

Digital television (DTV) receivers are among the most popular consumer electronics devices presently sold around the world. They are affordable and flexible, and they currently gather free-to-air television (TV), streaming, gaming, and general media playback, among other services. Due to this, they are constantly changing to accommodate continuous enhancements and new features. However, innovations, services, and features must be developed in advance and then ported to a final commercial platform, but only when the latter is available. Such a scenario brings complexity and, consequently, longer development and porting cycles as initial implementations are usually performed on personal computers or similar devices. Besides, it inherently leads to many adjustments and modifications so new software modules can work together with the traditional ones in target devices. We tackle this problem and propose an architecture for a DTV receiver emulator that is able to create an environment very similar to what is found on final platforms. Consequently, an intended feature or service is developed to the point that it is almost completely adapted to its final domain. We have performed a real implementation of such an architecture that was used in some experiments involving the creation and testing of new features, which showed the feasibility of our proposal.