Determining the age rating for a channel, event, or content

Overview

To enforce parental controls, a client application needs to know the age rating for content, channel, or event that the user wants to watch so it can prompt for the parental PIN where appropriate.

When the app requests channel, event, or content metadata from the Metadata Service (MDS), the response includes the age rating. See the examples below.

For a DVB broadcast channel, a client app running on an STB will typically have cached EPG data that it obtained from MDS / Content Discovery Facade. Because schedules can change, the app should not rely on checking the cached EPG to see which event is currently being broadcast (and therefore whether it needs to prompt the user for the parental PIN).

Instead, the client app should match the event ID from the Android TV Input Framework (TIF) with the broadcastEventId that MDS / Content discovery facade provide in their event metadata to get the correct event metadata.

See:

• The Content Discovery Facade's pre-defined EPG queries include broadcastEventId in their responses:
  • Retrieving events for an EPG window – pre-defined queries
  • Retrieving previous/now/next programmes – pre-defined queries
• If you want to retrieve a specific event by its broadcastEventId, run an advanced query with this field as a filter. See Retrieving events for an EPG window – advanced queries.

Requests

The metadata requests for contents, channels, and events are as follows.

In the response, look for the Ratings block for each entity. This contains the rating threshold for each applicable ratings body.

Contents

https://<host>:<port>/metadata/delivery/v2/<provider>/vod/editorials

This call is explained in more detail in Retrieve content information.

Channels

https://<host>:<port>/metadata/delivery/GLOBAL/btv/services

This call is explained in more detail in (22.50_Q4) Retrieving channel lists.

Events

Depending on your requirements, use one of the following endpoints to get event metadata:

https://<host>:<port>/<endpoint>/metadata/epg

This call is explained in more detail in Retrieving events for an EPG window – pre-defined queries.

https://<host>:<port>/metadata/delivery/<provider>/btv/programmes

This call is explained in more detail in Retrieving events for an EPG window – advanced queries.

See also

For full details of these API, see the Metadata Server (MDS) API Documentation.