Educational Television Broadcasting in Germany: Prevailing Practices, Existing Challenges and Adoptable Policies

Television is widely used for educational purposes but has still not achieved its fullest potential neither in developed nor in developing countries. This worldwide under performance invite experts and academics to join hands to search causes and provide suggestions to make television a better and popular learning tool. Guided by this philosophy, the present paper analyzes the educational television broadcasting in Germany from different perspectives. The focus of analysis includes measures and practices adopted by German institutions/broadcasters to promote educational television. Besides dealing with these issues, the paper discusses existing challenges and suggests best adoptable educational television broadcasting polices from Germany to promote educational television in global perspectives.

Software als Schutzgegenstand des Europäischen Urheberrechts

After 20 years of silence, two recent references from the Czech Republic (Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace, Case C-393/09) and from the English High Court (SAS Institute, Case C-406/10) touch upon several questions that are fundamental for the extent of copyright protection for software under the Computer Program Directive 91/25 (now 2009/24) and the Information Society Directive 2001/29. In Case C-393/09, the European Court of Justice held that “the object of the protection conferred by that directive is the expression in any form of a computer program which permits reproduction in different computer languages, such as the source code and the object code.” As “any form of expression of a computer program must be protected from the moment when its reproduction would engender the reproduction of the computer program itself, thus enabling the computer to perform its task,” a graphical user interface (GUI) is not protected under the Computer Program Directive, as it does “not enable the reproduction of that computer program, but merely constitutes one element of that program by means of which users make use of the features of that program.” While the definition of computer program and the exclusion of GUIs mirror earlier jurisprudence in the Member States and therefore do not come as a surprise, the main significance of Case C-393/09 lies in its interpretation of the Information Society Directive. In confirming that a GUI “can, as a work, be protected by copyright if it is its author’s own intellectual creation,” the ECJ continues the Europeanization of the definition of “work” which began in Infopaq (Case C-5/08). Moreover, the Court elaborated this concept further by excluding expressions from copyright protection which are dictated by their technical function. Even more importantly, the ECJ held that a television broadcasting of a GUI does not constitute a communication to the public, as the individuals cannot have access to the “essential element characterising the interface,” i.e., the interaction with the user. The exclusion of elements dictated by technical functions from copyright protection and the interpretation of the right of communication to the public with reference to the “essential element characterising” the work may be seen as welcome limitations of copyright protection in the interest of a free public domain which were not yet apparent in Infopaq. While Case C-393/09 has given a first definition of the computer program, the pending reference in Case C-406/10 is likely to clarify the scope of protection against nonliteral copying, namely in how far the protection extends beyond the text of the source code to the design of a computer program and where the limits of protection lie as regards the functionality of a program and mere “principles and ideas.” In light of the travaux préparatoires, it is submitted that the ECJ is also likely to grant protection for the design of a computer program, while excluding both the functionality and underlying principles and ideas from protection under the European copyright directives.

Walking a Thin Line: The Regulation of EPGs

The digitisation of television broadcasting has facilitated an exponential growth both in the number and the diversity of programs and channels. Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) help consumers find their way in this abundance of offerings.EPGs serve as a classical listing magazine or broadcasting guide with extensive information on television programs; like VCRs, they enable the recording of programs; as search engines, they allow users to look for content on the basis of a keyword; and finally, EPGs list the most favoured programs on the first page, either on the basis of popularity, the personal profile of the consumer or on the basis of agreements with particular broadcasting agencies. This article assesses how various European countries approach the regulation of EPGs and determines whether and how they try to reaffirm guarantees for diversity and pluralism in the digital television environment.

Video Composer and Live Video Conductor: Future Professions for the Interactive Digital Broadcasting Industry

Innovations in hardware and network technologies lead to an exploding number of non-interrelated parallel media streams. Per se this does not mean any additional value for consumers. Broadcasting and advertisement industries have not yet found new formats to reach the individual user with their content. In this work we propose and describe a novel digital broadcasting framework, which allows for the live staging of (mass) media events and improved consumer personalisation. In addition new professions for future TV production workflows which will emerge are described, namely the 'video composer' and the 'live video conductor'.

Methods and Applications in Interactive Broadcasting

Interactive TV technology has been addressed in many previous works, but there is sparse research on the topic of interactive content broadcasting and how to support the production process. In this article, the interactive broadcasting process is broadly defined to include studio technology and digital TV applications at consumer set-top boxes. In particular, augmented reality studio technology employs smart-projectors as light sources and blends real scenes with interactive computer graphics that are controlled at end-user terminals. Moreover, TV producer-friendly multimedia authoring tools empower the development of novel TV formats. Finally, the support for user-contributed content raises the potential to revolutionize the hierarchical TV production process, by introducing the viewer as part of content delivery chain.

MHP Oriented Interactive Augmented Reality System for Sports Broadcasting Environments

Television and movie images have been altered ever since it was technically possible. Nowadays embedding advertisements, or incorporating text and graphics in TV scenes, are common practice, but they can not be considered as integrated part of the scene. The introduction of new services for interactive augmented television is discussed in this paper. We analyse the main aspects related with the whole chain of augmented reality production. Interactivity is one of the most important added values of the digital television: This paper aims to break the model where all TV viewers receive the same final image. Thus, we introduce and discuss the new concept of interactive augmented television, i. e. real time composition of video and computer graphics - e.g. a real scene and freely selectable images or spatial rendered objects - edited and customized by the end user within the context of the user's set top box and TV receiver.

Semi-Automated Creation of Converged iTV Services: From Macromedia Director Simulations to Services Ready for Broadcast

While sound and video may capture viewers' attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals. The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services.

Exploiting OSGi capabilities from MHP applications

In this paper we introduce a cooperative environment between the Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) and home networking with the aim of allowing the interaction between interactive TV applications and the controllers of the in-home appliances in a natural way. More specifically, our proposal consists of merging MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), one of the main standard frameworks for IDTV, with OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative), the most widely used open platform to set up Residential Gateways. To overcome the radically different nature of these specifications the function-oriented MHP middleware and the service-oriented OSGi framework , we define a new kind of application, coined as XbundLET. Although this software bridge is suitable to enable the interaction between MHP and OSGi applications in both directions, we concretely focus on exposing our implementation experience in only one direction: from MHP to the OSGi world.

Interactive Ray Tracing for Virtual TV Studio Applications

In the last years, the well known ray tracing algorithm gained new popularity with the introduction of interactive ray tracing methods. The high modularity and the ability to produce highly realistic images make ray tracing an attractive alternative to raster graphics hardware. Interactive ray tracing also proved its potential in the field of Mixed Reality rendering and provides novel methods for seamless integration of real and virtual content. Actor insertion methods, a subdomain of Mixed Reality and closely related to virtual television studio techniques, can use ray tracing for achieving high output quality in conjunction with appropriate visual cues like shadows and reflections at interactive frame rates. In this paper, we show how interactive ray tracing techniques can provide new ways of implementing virtual studio applications.

How to Improve the Production Process for interactive TV with semi-formal Methods

The central question for this paper is how to improve the production process by closing the gap between industrial designers and software engineers of television(TV)-based User Interfaces (UI) in an industrial environment. Software engineers are highly interested whether one UI design can be converted into several fully functional UIs for TV products with different screen properties. The aim of the software engineers is to apply automatic layout and scaling in order to speed up and improve the production process. However, the question is whether a UI design lends itself for such automatic layout and scaling. This is investigated by analysing a prototype UI design done by industrial designers. In a first requirements study, industrial designers had created meta-annotations on top of their UI design in order to disclose their design rationale for discussions with software engineers. In a second study, five (out of ten) industrial designers assessed the potential of four different meta-annotation approaches. The question was which annotation method industrial designers would prefer and whether it could satisfy the technical requirements of the software engineering process. One main result is that the industrial designers preferred the method they were already familiar with, which therefore seems to be the most effective one although the main objective of automatic layout and scaling could still not be achieved.

TV Signal Delivery to Cable Operators and DTH Platform Operators

The paper discusses new business models of transmission of television programs in the context of definitions of broadcasting and retransmission. Typically the whole process of supplying content to the end user has two stages: a media service provider supplies a signal assigned to a given TV channel to the cable operators and satellite DTH platform operators (dedicated transmission), and cable operators and satellite DTH platform operators transmit this signal to end users. In each stage the signals are encoded and are not available for the general public without the intervention of cable/platform operators. The services relating to the supply and transmission of the content are operated by different business entities: each earns money separately and each uses the content protected by copyright. We should determine how to define the actions of the entity supplying the signal with the TV program directly to the cable/digital platform operator and the actions of the entity providing the end user with the signal. The author criticizes the approach presented in the Chellomedia and Norma rulings, arguing that they lead to a significant level of legal uncertainty, and poses the basic questions concerning the notion of “public” in copyright.