Internet Technologies

Hamburg.
For the last conference of my European odyssey, I've made my way to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, which plays host to a one-day conference of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research on the theme of "Finanzierung von Qualitätscontent", or "Financing Quality Content". I'm in Hamburg as a Fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, and will be speaking later today, on motivations for the creation of quality user-generated content.

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.
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.
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.
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.

Leuven.
Vivian Genaro Motti is the next speaker at EuroITV 2009, and she continues the semantic theme. She begins, though, by highlighting the shift towards ubiquitous computing, which is allows for a capture-and-access process - capturing everything in the environment of the user, and accessing this in the context of later use (used e.g. to document meetings). Such material may then also be further annotated, of course, augmenting captured video with comments, information, and other details.

This, then, enables user collaboration, even a kind of social TV based on iDTV technologies. This utilises a watch-and-comment (WAC) approach which captures individual user comments and generates annotated interactive video files. A technology developed by the present project, the WaCTool, uses digital ink, text, and voice for the creation of such metadata, provides text-based chat functionality, and generates annotated video files. Such collaboration enables group communication and creates enriched content, which may be useful in a variety of contexts.

Leuven.
The post-lunch session here at EuroITV 2009 is the one that my paper is in as well, so I've refrained from sampling the fine Belgian beers available during lunch. We start with Marcelo Manzato, whose interest is in the peer annotation of multimedia content. Digital television makes it easier for user to interact with multimedia content, and this is happening for example through YouTube and similar services, of course, as well as through the proliferation of mobile devices (and the necessary adaptation and personalisation of content for such contexts).

Leuven.
Finally in this session at EuroITV 2009, we come to Sander Smit. His interest is in interactive networked multimedia experiences, combining TV, Web, and mobile communication. Such combination is not easy given the different histories of such technologies, and yet there is a strong push towards convergence here. Additionally, there is a push towards open service models, away from the proprietary telecom-driven frameworks of the past.

This involves the roll-out of personalisation and social networking elements in many contexts, using a variety of technological channels (Internet, mobile, broadcasting) to access available content and services. Such services themselves constitute a bundle of previously separate services, which are now combined and offered as a single service proposition to users. As a result, the service domain will become increasingly complex - which not least also means that managing information, privacy, and security becomes increasingly difficult. On the flip side, there are also substantial new opportunities for advertising.