INTERACTIVE TELEVISION TRIGGERS HAVING CONNECTED CONTENT/DISCONNECTED CONTENT ATTRIBUTE

摘要

Interactive television content can be classified as either disconnected content or as connected content. An interactive television system involves some receivers that cannot establish connections to the Internet and therefore cannot properly process triggers to connected content. The system also involves other receiver units that can establish connections to the Internet and can process triggers to connected content. A trigger (306) in accordance with the invention involves a "connected content/disconnected content" attribute (401) that identifies the trigger as either a trigger to disconnected content or a trigger to connected content. Receiver units that can not process triggers to connected content can therefore use the attribute to identify triggers to such connected content and to ignore such triggers. In another embodiment, a relay station that relays broadcast television to receiver units that cannot establish connections to the Internet uses the connected content/disconnected content attributes to identify disconnected content triggers, to retrieve the identified disconnected content from the Internet, and to relay that disconnected content to the receiver units. In another embodiment, two triggers are broadcast for an enhancement. The first trigger alerts the relay station that disconnected content is to be prefetched from the Internet and relayed to the receiver units before the second trigger that actually triggers the enhancement on the receiver unit is received.