A.J. Jansen

Usages of the Secondary Screen in an Interactive Television Environment: Control, Enrich, Share, and Transfer Television Content

This paper investigates a number of techniques and services around a unifying concept: the secondary screen. Far too often television consumption is considered a passive activity. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the media experience, there are other times in which whilst watching television, people talk, scan the program guide, record another program or recommend a program by phone. This paper identifies four major usages of the secondary screen in an interactive digital television environment: control, enrich, share, and transfer television content. By control we refer to the decoupling of the television stream, optional enhanced content, and television controls. Moreover, the user can use the secondary screen to enrich or author media content by, for example, including personalized media overlays such as an audio commentary that can be shared with his peer group. Finally, the secondary screen can be used to bring along the television content. This paper reviews previous work on the secondary screen, identifies the key usages, and based on a working system provides the experiences of developing relevant scenarios as well as an initial evaluation of them.

A presentation layer mechanism for multimedia playback mobility in service oriented architectures

This paper presents an approach for media presentation continuity in playback mode. We use the term presentation continuity over session transfer since our solution is at the presentation layer. Previous research on this topic has focused on transferring a particular stream or set of related streams at the sessions layer for live broadcasting or conferencing sessions. We argue that in the realm of service oriented architectures, such as telecom operator networks, this approach does not take full advantage of the particular case of media playback. Our mechanism presents an alternative to the traditional approach, which i) Lowers network control plane overhead, thus reducing chances of presentation consistency loss ii) Lowers network data overhead due to lesser need for transcoding iii) Delegates presentation consistency issues, such as inter-media synchronisation, to the media player iv) Dynamically adapts the presentation to the new target devices without transcoding. Finally, we present experimental results which show that our approach is implementable in acceptable time bounds.

A mechanism for presentation-layer media continuity in media playback mode

This demo presents a new approach for media presentation continuity in playback mode. We use the term presentation continuity over session transfer since our solution is at the presentation layer. Previous research on this topic has focused on transferring a particular stream or set of related streams at the sessions layer. Our approach presents an alternative, recognising the fact that a user is connected to a media presentation, which, may be composed of multiple sessions. The advantages of our approach are i) Lower network control plane overhead, thus reducing chances of semantic presentation loss ii) Lower network data overhead due to lesser need for transcoding iii) delegating presentation semantic issues, such as inter-media synchronisation, to the player iv) dynamically adapt the presentation to the new target devices without transcoding.