An Architecture for End-User TV Content Enrichment

This paper proposes an extension to the televisionwatching paradigm that permits an end-user to enrich broadcast content. Examples of this enriched content are: virtual edits that allow the order of presentation within the content to be changed or that allow the content to be subsetted; conditional text, graphic or video objects that can be placed to appear within content and triggered by viewer interaction; additional navigation links that can be added to structure how other users view the base content object. The enriched content can be viewed directly within the context of the TV viewing experience. It may also be shared with other users within a distributed peer group. Our architecture is based on a model that allows the original content to remain unaltered, and which respects DRM restrictions on content reuse. The fundamental approach we use is to define an intermediate content enhancement layer that is based on the W3C’s SMIL language. Using a pen-based enhancement interface, end-users can manipulate content that is saved in a home PDR setting. This paper describes our architecture and it provides several examples of how our system handles content enhancement. We also describe a reference implementation for creating and viewing enhancements.

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.

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.