Blogs

Leuven.
And we're in the final session of EuroITV 2009 already, which starts with Emmanuel Tsekleves. He begins by noting the range of media, platforms, and devices now available in the home, which increases usage potentials, but also complexity. The TV remains predominantly situated in a shared social space - such as the living room - and is reasonably simple to use. It offers a high-quality audiovisual experience, and still remains the common denominator of entertainment and information access in the home.

But the emergence of other media in the home is changing this, and Emmanuel's team tested the impact of such changes by examining how the introduction of an experimental new convergent media device would change users' practices. This teased out information on the core experience of television, the role of TV as a shared resource, and its role in multitasking, multimedia experiences.

Leuven.
We move on now to David Wilfinger as the next presenter at EuroITV 2009. His focus is on developing better ways to study the use of interactive television systems in situ, in real life. Even supposedly lifelike labs in research facilities cannot replicate these situations. The system being evaluated in this context was a new remote control system for ITV, which included a fingerprint reader that enabled personalisation of programme choices (as well as the blocking of channels or programmes for younger users).

Leuven.
I'm afraid I missed out on blogging part of Alessandro Basso's presentation at EuroITV 2009 as I had to reboot my machine again - something's not quite right here. His project is an interesting exercise in datamining folksonomies: his team examined usage patterns for the Italian online PVR system VCast Faucet, which enables users to set up recordings of Italian TV programmes.

The recording periods set up (including a user-selected name for the recording, and their channel and time choices) provide rich information on what discrete television events are of interest to users, and it is possible to evaluate these also to provide future recommendations for programmes of interest - a kind of user-generated electronic programme guide. Not least, the titles given by users to the broadcast sections they choose to record can be evaluated to identify what the content of these periods is.

Leuven.
The next session here at EuroITV 2009 starts with another presenter from Alcatel-Lucent, Danny de Vleeschauwer. He notes the growth in catch-up television (CuTV), through initiatives such as the BBC's iPlayer or the ABC's iView - so that content is no longer consumed at exactly the same time (though still concentrated in a key period of time). This changes the requirements for IPTV: it can no longer operate under a broadcast or multicast model, but must now employ a unicast model which delivers a unique stream to each tuned-in viewer.

Leuven.
The morning keynote on this second and last day of EuroITV 2009 is by Jan van Bogaert from Alcatel-Lucent. He notes the gradual shift from a triple-play model for connecting households using broadband (comprising of IPTV, voice, and Internet communication) towards a more converged model which he calls application-enabled broadband.

The older model still involves a walled garden approach, too,where IPTV, for example, is streamed into the home using the broadband network, but delivered only to the TV, not to the PC. A different model is to stream content 'over the top' on the Net, allowing access via broadbandp-connected TVs. This has also led to IPTV providers thinking about expanding their market by offering their TV channels not only as IPTV to their own subscribers, but also streamed over the top to users subscribed with their competitors.

Leuven.
The final keynote for this first day at EuroITV 2009 is by Marc Hassenzahl, whose focus is on user experience. He begins by noting that technology needs to be humane; it needs to be adapted to people's actual uses. This is even more important as the boundaries between tools and content are blurring; however, the main tool for researching this remains human-technology interaction research, which focusses simply on usability engineering, on whether tools work.

But is functionality everything? What about the experiential dimension - the hedonic perspective that needs to be considered in addition to the pragmatic one? Both sides need to be considered: a product needs to provide value and fulfil task needs, but must also feel right and be enjoyable to use. This is now slowly being realised in human-technology interaction theory.

Leuven.
The final speaker in this session at EuroITV 2009 is George Lekakos, whose interest is in interactive television advertising. What opportunities for new developments exist here? In the first place, any new models need to increase advertising effectiveness factors - and for interactive advertising, there are also a number of normally less important factors (for groups watching TV together, interactive ads may be less effective as only one group member holds the remote and can control the interactive content.

Presentation models are also important - from impulsive response ('press the red button') to advertising microsites that pop up on screen in addition to the continuing programme (which is sized down), to miniDAL (a small dedicated advertiser location, delivered for example as an overlapping picture in picture) or full-blown DALs delivered as exclusive channels. There is no sufficient research on advertising effectiveness for these models, and a focus mainly on the screen splitting approach so far.

Leuven.
Skylla Janssen is next at EuroITV 2009. She also wonders about the future TV, and poses the question of whether there's a space for user involvement in the participatory design of new television formats and content.

I'm afraid I missed out on blogging a good part of her presentation as I had to reboot my laptop - but she presented a nice survey of TV producers' attitudes towards incorporating user-generated content and ideas (as you'd expect, such input was valued only where it generated money - think SMS voting in reality TV - or where users were seen as providing unskilled labour in creating and maintaining fan communities around mainstream programming.

Leuven.
We move on to Janez Zaletelj, whose paper at EuroITV 2009 focusses on real-time viewer feedback in TV production, here in the context of the 2008 Olympic Games. Traditionally, in sports broadcasting, broadcast directors have no feedback from viewers whatsoever; adding such feedback channels, however, enables them to check the viewer acceptance of content, make changes accordingly, and otherwise communicate with the audience.

The project used IPTV for this purpose; four interlinked sub-channels carryng different content and allowing user votes as well as information flashes from the producers, were made available within the overall Olympic Games channel. The system was able to gather viewer statistics on each of the channels and on what content ws being watched, and this was able to be correlated with viewer profiles (gathered in some detail for the specific purpose of this prototype study).

Leuven.
We begin the next session at EuroITV 2009 with Gijs Geleijnse from Philips. He notes that many of the new innovations in the interactive TV area will require new user interfaces - for example for text entry on television screens. Ideally this would happen without adding yet another device to the living room (i.e., not another remote control...).

Gijs's study examined a number of options for this - multi-tap (SMS style), an on-screen keyboard, and a regular computer keyboard. It evaluated the usability as well as the enjoyability of such technologies - and the standard computer keyboard won out on both measures.