Interactive TV

While at the BBC, I started working in Interactive TV; at this time, this was the early days of services being designed and built at the BBC from 1997 to 2000.  For example, I worked on prototypes for the Digital Text service for digital satellite.   

After leaving the BBC, I worked for a year and a bit at a start-up called Codecell started by some extremely talented people that I had met while at the BBC.  And then I went to on to work at Sky Digtial for a few years.

My most recent work in Interactive TV has been for Chellomedia Interactive (now called UPC) to develop order ahead pay per view applications in 2006 & 2007.

In 2008, I worked at Miniweb.tv working on their portal on Sky Digital.  A new version of the portal v2.1 was launched in October.

Chellomedia Interactive

Most recently in 2006 & 2007, I worked at Chellomedia Interactive  on 2 Order ahead pay view applications.  An order head application is an application that allows the viewer to see what movies or events they have purchased for viewing.   The applications were deployed in Ireland and Switzerland.

Cablecom Switzerland

Sky Vegas Live - Super Keno

sky vegas Live

I worked as the Open TV application developer for Super Keno for the Sky Vegas Live channel.  Super Keno was the first enhanced TV show launched by Sky Digital of its kind. The application/service would handle real-time updates in the broadcast stream to control the game action.  The service was loosely synchronized and works quite well. I did all the programming for the client application which displayed the game cards and showed the game results and placing bets online via a "gaming engine" on a remote server. 

The work I did was also used as the foundation for Poker Keno and Sky Vegas Live Roulette.  I supported the developers of these  games when they launched on Sky Vegas Live. 

The Super Keno application was developed in C in the Open TV API; it was attached at run-time using dynamic linking to Sky's WAP TV browser.  The WAP TV browser had some additional API's on top of the Open TV API.  The   Super Keno application handled key input, real time events, animations and XML request/responses.   As there service was using real time updates, the internal state machine was quite complex.

Monsters (Atticmedia for Challenge TV/Flextech UK)

Monsters (Atticmedia for Challenge TV/Flextech UK)

Monsters is a classic arcade style game.  Defeat the monsters before they get you.  The game featured optimized collision detection using circles to represent the objects.  The artifical intelligence for the monsters was rule based using finte state machines.

T***** Text (Atticmedia for Challenge TV/Flextech UK)

T***** Text (Atticmedia for Challenge TV/Flextech UK)

This game is a variation on the famous Tetris game with the difference being you spell words from a list. The level ends when all the words have been spelt.

Rapid Rabbit (Codecell for Two Way TV)

Rapid Rabbit (Codecell for Two Way TV)

Rapid Rabbit was game similar to the arcade game Qbert.  

Picnic Antics (Codecell for Two Way TV)

Picnic Antics (Codecell for Two Way TV)

Picnic Antics is puzzle style game.  The objective was to remove the ants from the picnic by lining up ants of the same color and they would disappear.