The term Web 2.0 is mainly used to describe Web applications related to interactive information sharing. These applications have a user-centered design and facilitate collaboration on the World Wide Web. In contrast to Web sites where users can only view information, a Web 2.0 site allows users to interact with each other and to extend the Web site’s content.

Web 2.0 provides some new Web application programming interfaces (APIs), such as representational state transfer (REST) and SOAP, and some new dynamic programming languages and frameworks, such as Ajax and Ruby on Rails (RoR). These technologies led to the popularization of Web mashups. A Web mashup is a Web site or Web application that mixes data, presentation, or functionality from different sources to create a completely new service, using a public interface or so-called mashup API.

This paper describes a mashup API for retrieving information about the digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H) services available on a mobile TV (m-TV) receiver and combining these DVB-H services with other Web sources. The general theory sections present all necessary information about DVB-H, mashups, TV APIs, and mobile technology, in a very precise and simple style. Next, the authors describe the basic idea of the paper: to separate the back-end (getting the information about content) from the front-end (displaying the content on the m-TV receiver), and to enable useful applications. All parts of the scheme are described in detail and illustrated with images. Finally, the authors give some practical implementation of their ideas.

This is a very interesting and well-written paper that deals with topics of great interest these days. The paper not only gives some new, good ideas for m-TV applications, but also offers some hints that could be used as a starting point for future research.