New Controls for Viewing Sports Television

Leuven.
The third speaker in this session at EuroITV 2009 is Stephen Lynn, who shifts our focus to using multimedia annotations to provide a different sports viewing experience, initially for American Football. Currently, such TV content is accessed mainly still through the digital video recorder (DVR), and its most commonly used functionality remains fast forward and rewind, which is often frustrating to use.

Using annotations, there may be an opportunity to move towards other, more salient forms of random access to specific points in a game - accessing and rewatching specific plays or game phases, for example (also from multiple camera angles), and accessing the game statistics for a specific play, for example. At the same time, such controls must still be able to be used in a 'lean-back' mode that is typical for the conventional television experience.

A further difficulty is enabling group viewing in this context - jumping around in a game is highly disorienting especially also for those viewers who do not hold the controls. This can be addressed relatively easily, though, by providing position prompts for each time skip, for example - i.e. showing the elapsed game time or other relevant information.

In testing, it turns out that usage of camera change functionality tends to be spiky - related to specific events in the match. Skipping to the next play is much more regular. After a short learning curve, participants no longer needed to bring up the on-screen usage instructions. About a quarter of all users preferred the conventional remote (a third of these didn't try the new controller first-hand, though) - largely, though, because the new controller prototype was a two-handed model. Interestingly, too, using the time-skip functionality didn't reduce the time spent viewing the game - time gained by skipping dead time between plays was balanced out by additional time spent watching further replays or trying different camera angles. A number of other, additional features were also requested. Overall, the system turned more passive into more active viewers.

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