This tutorial is aimed at those of you who are moving to the interactive TV world, either from a background in PC software development, or as a manager who needs to know more about this funny DTV stuff.

This tutorial can be split into two main sections: the first section covers the basics of digital TV systems and how DTV signals are transmitted, while the second section takes a detailed look at the DSM-CC standard that is used by most digital TV systems for broadcasting data streams.

There's a lot of technical stuff in the next few pages, but we'll try and keep that to a minimum unless we explicitly have to. Some parts of this are more technical than others: only people who really need to know the gory details of DSM-CC should try to read past the introduction to DSM-CC, for instance.

At the moment, some sections are fairly specific to the DVB system of digital TV broadcasting. To stop anyone dealing with OCAP from feeling left out, however, we do have a tutorial on ATSC service information under development.