ACAP, is the Adanced Common Application Platform. It is the middelware standard for US terrestrial terminals (also known as set-tops, hosts or receivers). ACAP is the result of harmonisation of the previous ATSC-DASE standard and CableLabs OCAP.

ACAP is written to comply with the requirements of the Globally Executable MHP (GEM) specification. Since OCAP is also compliant to GEM, it follows that ACAP applications, when transmitted on a US cable network, should operate successfully on OCAP terminals.

ACAP applications are classified into two categories. Those which contain solely procedural content, are written in Java and are combined with graphics, video and audio, these are known as ACAP-J applications. Those that are declarative, essentially being multimedia documents consisting of XHTML, styles, scripts and embedded graphics, video and audio, are known as ACAP-X applications. It should be noted that the ACAP specification states that ACAP-X support is optional. A copy of the current ACAP specification can be found on the ATSC web site.

UniSoft through its partners plans to offer ACAP versions of the products described on this site. In particular:

• The OCAP Security File Generator, will generate authenticated ACAP applications with virtually no changes to the current version.
• SoftOC, already produces PSIP in-band and all profiles of SCTE 065.
• TSDeveloper is available with dual OCAP and ACAP outputs.
• The XAV Application Validator fully supports ACAP.