European Experts Revolutionize Interlinking of TV and Web

By: MODUL University Vienna
 
VIENNA - May 7, 2015 - PRLog -- LinkedNews Creates the Information Source of the Future

MODUL University Vienna coordinates an international group of experts in developing the TV of the future

The seamless interplay of television and Internet has now been made possible by an international group of media experts from eight countries, with scientific coordination based in Vienna. With its application LinkedNews, the team demonstrates for the first time the full potential of optimum interlinking of TV and the Web. A custom-tailored application for mobile devices offers an ideal selection of additional information and background reports on otherwise briefly summarized TV news reports. German regional broadcaster RBB got involved as early as the application's development phase, showing the great interest of established TV stations. The team, which is supported by EU funding, gives broadcasters access not "only" to finished applications, but also to comprehensive technologies for developing their own formats for integrating TV and Internet content.

TV users of the 21st century don't just sit passively on the couch – they always have their mobile devices within easy reach. Boring television segments or commercial breaks are used to check e-mails, visit social media sites or order a pizza – and viewers are no longer "on the air" for the TV station. Television broadcasters still haven't succeeded in making smart use of the online universe to prevent this mental wandering. Now, a Europe-wide team headed by scientific coordinator and media technology expert Dr. Lyndon Nixon has done just that.

Active, not Passive

With the development of LinkedNews, the group has succeeded in offering television viewers a comprehensive range of information on a mobile device, seamlessly supplementing TV news. In this way, passive viewers become active news users. They can now look up background information on people or places that isn't provided in the brief TV report: "Who is the person next to Chancellor Merkel?" or "When and where was the last meeting of the EU finance ministers?" In the future, all it will take is a simple click and the information will appear on a tablet or smartphone. But this application, which was developed in cooperation with German regional broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), is, in fact, "only" the front end of a more extensive technological development. It began in 2011 and ran over a period of nearly four years in the context of the EU project "LinkedTV", which involved the collaboration of 12 experts from eight European countries.

The scientific aspects of the development work were coordinated by Dr. Nixon, Assistant Professor in the Institute for New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna. Speaking about the project results, he said: "An application like LinkedNews is a first use case. Our goal was primarily to give TV broadcasters the possibility to develop such formats themselves, tailored to their individual needs. That's why, within the framework of the LinkedTV project, we developed all the necessary conditions to allow TV broadcasters to do this. LinkedNews demonstrates how it works and what potential lies dormant there."

The team working with Dr. Nixon was thus able to develop, for instance, a comprehensive package of six modular technologies that enable TV stations to completely independently enrich their programs with links to additional content for user-friendly applications. This is based on a set of algorithms that extract the meaning of the content of audiovisual materials and categorize the aspects that are relevant to viewers for further use. Building on this, a technology was developed that allows the previously captured and categorized content to be automatically linked with information from the Internet. Here, it was of great importance to the team to give TV broadcasters complete authority over the sources used for this feature. Therefore, only sources that are included in a list defined by the broadcaster (whitelist) are used. The development of a browser-based Curation Tool enables the program creators to then also select which of the automatically-generated information links are available to viewers in the client application.

Tele-visionary applications

A toolkit was also developed that gives TV broadcasters the ability to create, with relative ease, the applications that offer the supplementary information in a way that is tailored specifically to each individual program. This additional functionality can be developed for an app on a companion mobile screen or, given a suitable device configuration, be fully integrated in the TV program as a SmartTV app. In this case, links to additional information are triggered by an app on the TV itself and, once the next generation of smart TVs arrive, which support the second version of the HbbTV standard, the supplementary content can be opened and browsed on a second screen device such as a tablet synchronized to the TV program. Further new features from the LinkedTV team make it possible to personalize the supplementary information offered to the viewers’ individual interests, as well as providing broadcasters a platform with complete control over the entire workflow, from idea to application.

The practical applicability of all these technologies was demonstrated in the context of the LinkedTV project not only in collaboration with RBB and LinkedNews; Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS has already used the extensive options for linking TV and Internet to further enhance a popular cultural program. The resulting application, LinkedCulture, offers viewers comprehensive additional information on works of art that play a role within the program. In this way, users can choose the desired depth of information – and television of the digital 21st century thereby shares control over the information presented with its users.

Further Information and Showcases: http://showcase.linkedtv.eu

About LinkedTV

LinkedTV is a project of the EU's 7th Framework Program (project number FP7-ICT-287911) which ran from October 2011 to March 2015. The consortium partners are: RBB Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (Germany), The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Netherlands), University of Mons (Belgium), CONDAT (Germany), Noterik (Netherlands), Fraunhofer IAIS (Germany), CERTH-ITI (Greece), EURECOM (France), University of Economics, Prague (Czech Republic), CWI (Netherlands), University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and MODUL University Vienna (Austria).
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Source:MODUL University Vienna
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Tags:TV, Internet, Web, Information
Industry:Computers
Location:Vienna - Vienna - Austria
Subject:Projects
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