Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Rovi Technologies Corporation

Ross Hewit

Edward Goziker

Toby Steele

Pavel Glozman

Tim Zobel

Bryan A Woodruff

John Bradstreet

Techniques are disclosed herein that provide a TV receiver that supports a set of existing iTV standards and proprietary iTV implementations. Further, the TV receiver can be extended to support additional iTV standards and proprietary iTV implementations. A digital television data stream is received and processed by a client. The digital television data stream is analyzed to determine which interactive television format is present. A registry of interactive television virtual machines is searched to determine whether a virtual machine is registered for the interactive television format. Each of the interactive television virtual machines is adapted for one of the interactive television formats. If a virtual machine that matches the interactive television format is found, it is loaded and hosted. Hosting the virtual includes providing services to the virtual machine through common application programming interfaces (APIs) machine includes. The common APIs may be used by any virtual machine that is loaded.

Pluggable interactive television

A method, system and/or computer program product for managing the use of media content ratings information by a media content receiver, including communicating media content for presentation by a media content receiver; communicating media content ratings information for the media content, the media content ratings information being communicated discretely from the media content. The communicating operations include one or both of transmitting and receiving the content and/or ratings information.

Management of media content ratings information communicated discretely from media content

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Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Ross Hewit