Günther Hölbling

SIVA suite: authoring system and player for interactive non-linear videos

In this paper, an intuitive authoring system and player for interactive non-linear video called SIVA Suite is presented for demonstration. Such videos are enriched by additional content. Possible forms of additional content are plaintext, richtext, images and videos. Interactivity is implemented based upon selection buttons which allow the user to follow different plotlines. Additional forms of interactivity are realized as clickable objects in the video and a table of contents for the video. The software provides a tool for manually cutting videos and an automated shot detection. The non-linear flow of the video can be designed using a scene graph with fork nodes. Editors for text and images support the user in adding information to the video. A finished video project is exported to an XML file with a specific schema and Flash video (flv) files. The player processes the XML file, plays the interactive video and shows additional contents. It can be customized to the requirements of the presentation of the video and the corporate design of the homepage the video is embedded in.

Interactive TV Services on Mobile Devices

The recent digitalization of television creates new opportunities for enhancing the viewers experience with interactivity. Interactive TV (iTV) is often solely understood as the ability to change a programs storyline. Besides this interpretation, iTV in general means providing some kind of interactive add-ons or TV-related content and services. For example, the viewer might participate in a game show, gather additional information on news topics, or buy a product presented in a commercial. The combination of digital TV and modern set-top boxes facilitates the deployment of such innovative services. In this context, we developed a prototype platform that uses mobile devices to support multiuser and personalized access for iTV services. The mobile devices connect to the set-top box with ad hoc mechanisms over an existing home network, enabling inexperienced users to access and use the services without having to worry about configuration.

PersonalTV : A TV recommendation system using program metadata for content filtering ()

This paper presents an approach to build a TV recommendation system called PersonalTV that enables the use of multiple classifiers, each one specialized on selected attributes of detailed program information. For generating adequate recommendations, the system makes use of content filtering and the preferences directly specified by the user within an MPEG-7 profile. By tracking user actions and interpreting their semantics, the system is able to individually weight these actions and dynamically adjusts the process to the user’s evolving preferences. We show how specialized spam fighting methods can successfully be transferred to the area of recommendation systems and adapted accordingly. Being lightweight, these methods are especially applicable in resource-constrained environments such as TV set-top boxes or mobile devices. Moreover, the use of the variance of the beta-distribution as a confidence value for each recommendation is presented.

Content-based tag generation to enable a tag-based collaborative tv-recommendation system.

With the application of the Web 2.0 philosophy to more and more online services and platforms, tagging has become a well established collaboration method. It is often used to simplify organization, navigation and discovery of information and resources in huge archives. In parallel, due to recent developments in digital television, audiences are confronted with a rising amount of available content and demand for better ways to discover programs of interest. In this paper, we propose a tagging-based solution to this problem. Using a content-based filtering approach, we present an individualized and flexible tag generation process. User specific as well as collaborative tag generation is enabled. Based on generated and user added tags, program recommendations are derived in a collaborative filtering step.

Application of recommendation methods for TV programs

We present the adaptation and evaluation of classification methods for TV Program recommendation. For our evaluation, we collected over a period of 10 months the TV viewing profiles of 67 users with watched 10,845 programs. Based on the results of this evaluation, we realized a TV Recommendation System.

Autorentool für interaktive Videos im E-Learning

Videos erfreuen sich immer groserer Beliebtheit im WWW. Auch in E-Learning-Applikationen kommen sie zunehmend zum Einsatz, da man sich erhofft, den Lernerfolg zu steigern. Das Medium Video scheint fur Betrachter einfacher verarbeitbar zu sein als andere Symbolsysteme, da dieses der alltaglichen Wahrnehmung am nachsten kommt. Durch die Integration interaktiver Funktionalitat kann der Lerner in seinem Lernfortschritt masgeblich unterstutzt werden, was ihm ein individualisiertes Lernen ermoglicht. Zwar sind Autorentools, welche die Produktion von interaktiven Videos ermoglichen, bereits am Markt vorhanden, zeichnen sich jedoch durch eine hohe Komplexitat, proprietare Formate und hohe Lizenzkosten aus. Daher soll eine Applikation entwickelt werden, welche die Produktion von interaktiven Videos nebst Experten auch Laien ermoglicht. Fur die adaquate Gestaltung des Tools sollte jedoch zuvor erortert werden, was der Begriff Interaktivitat uberhaupt umschreibt. Darauf aufbauend konnen im Weiteren Grundanforderungen an das geplante Tool aufgestellt werden, welche es ermoglichen das Tool zu planen.

Overview of Open Standards for Interactive TV (iTV)

Television has become the most important mass medium. The digitalisationin progress gives new possibilities to enrich the television experience. TheElectronic Program Guide - though still very limited - gives a first impressionof future television. There are various attempts to give the audience a moreactive role. All these can be found under the topic interactive TV. Besidesthe world of television, there is a fast growing community for videos in theWorld Wide Web (e.g. YouTube

Personalization of Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting

This special issue is devoted to a well-focused subject: personalization of mobile multimedia broadcasting. Nevertheless, the topics of the papers published here demonstrate an amazing diversity. This phenomenon suggests that our subject is both highly relevant and experiencing a period of rapid change. Until recently broadcasting has been a wellestablished, relatively stable technology. However, new usage scenarios, mobile consumers together with mobile devices, and the desire for personalized content are providing new challenges. We currently have many more questions than answers. We are confronted with a range of subtly different techniques, such as digital TV, IPTV, video-on-demand, WebTV, live casts, mobile TV, peer-to-peer TV, and video-portals, which use different encoding/decoding standards, transmission protocols, streaming methods, quality-of-service levels, and interactivity features. In addition, they often require different bandwidth and different infrastructure. In view of this diversity, it is sensible to take a fresh look at the basic concepts. The rest of this special issue is dedicated to presenting a nice selection of timely, ongoing research. Therefore, this editorial introduction starts (Sections 2–4) with a contextual overview authored by Laszlo Boszormenyi. This overview concentrates on “the past and the future of this topic”—leaving the present, together with all of its unsolved questions, to be the subject of the rest of the papers. An overview of the different contributions in this special issue closes this editorial introduction in Section 5. At first glance, broadcasting and personalization seem to contradict one another. The idea of broadcasting is to transmit a message from an authority to everybody; the idea of personalization is to exchange messages between individuals. Broadcasting offers a high degree of sharing and a low level of privacy. Personalization, on the other hand, usually offers the opposite: privacy increases, but sharing decreases. There are a number of basic issues requiring very different, often contradictory treatment, and strategies. May be the most important of these issues are (1) authenticity and popularity, (2) personalization and privacy, (3) sharing, (4) interactivity, and (5) rights management.

Agent Based MPEG Query Format Middleware for Standardized Multimedia Retrieval

The amount of multimedia data has increased tremendously world wide in the private as well as in the public sector. An unified access, navigation and search is hardly realizable in this distributed and heterogenous environment. In this context, the paper introduces an agent based middleware system for search and retrieval in multimedia repositories that bases on the newly standardized MPEG Query Format. The strength of the system can be summarized as follows: Due to the use of a standardized query language an unified access to heterogenous retrieval systems is guaranteed. Related to the use of an agent system, we especially address network segments in domains that show bandwidth characteristics such as low transfer rate or instabilities in connections. Predominantly, this is beneficial for environments dealing with mobile devices.