The emergence of Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) opened a set of technological possibilities that go beyond those offered\nby conventional TV. Among these opportunities we can highlight interactive contents that run together with linear TV program\n(television service where the viewer has to watch a scheduled TV program at the particular time it is offered and on the particular\nchannel it is presented on).However, developing interactive contents for this new platformis not as straightforward as, for example,\ndeveloping Internet applications. One of the options to make this development process easier and safer is to use an iDTV simulator.\nHowever, after having investigated some of the existing iDTVsimulation environments,we have found a limitation: these simulators\nmainly present solutions focused on the TV receiver, whose interactive content must be loaded in advance by the programmer\nto a local repository (e.g., Hard Drive, USB). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a tool, named BiS (Broadcast iDTV content\nSimulator), whichmakes possible a broader solution for the simulation of interactive contents. It allows simulating the transmission\nof interactive content along with the linear TV program (simulating the transmission of content over the air and in broadcast to\nthe receivers). To enable this, we defined a generic and easy-to-customize communication protocol that was implemented in the\ntool.The proposed environment differs from others because it allows simulating reception of both linear content and interactive\ncontent while running Java applications to allow such a content presentation.
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