EBIF was specified by CableLabs in response to direction by its MSO members who wanted to deploy interactive applications on existing STBs without the necessity of a truck-roll. By the end of the first quarter of this year the number of EBIF-enabled homes in the US exceeded 12 million. This quantity continues to grow rapidly as EBIF becomes deployed by many of the MSOs.

EBIF applications consist of a collection of one or more partitions containing resources and programmatic data. These applications are interpreted by an EBIF User Agent ("UA"), which needs to be implemented as native code on the set-top-box. The UA is responsible for decoding and rendering EBIF constructs on the TV screen.

It is important to note that EBIF is supplemental to tru2way (OCAP). Infact, EBIF applications are supported on OCAP platforms by use of an User Agent implemented as an OCAP application.

In terms of transmission from the headend or programmer uplink, EBIF requires a number of additions to a standard MPEG transport stream. These include two new descriptors in the PMT, an Elementary Stream containing an EISS Table (the ETV integrated signaling stream) and a data carousel for carriage of the application. The EISS contains three additional descriptors including a reference to the data carousel.

The carousel is either a DSM-CC Data Carousel or an Alternative Constrained Data Carousel (DigiCypherII) where the section size is limited to less than 1KB. The DSM-CC Data Carousel is required for Cisco set-to-boxes running EBIF user agents and DigiCypherII is required for Motorola DCTs.

TSBroadcaster fully supports delivery of EBIF applications. [View screen shot of TSBroadcaster ETV Application Page].

EBIF is a key component of many the current advanced advertising initiatives within the cable industry (Canoe, CableLabs SaFi and SCTE-130).

UniSoft's XAV application validator supports EBIF application conformance testing.