Pablo Cesar

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.

Enhancing social sharing of videos: fragment, annotate, enrich, and share

Media consumption is an inherently social activity, serving to communicate ideas and emotions across both small- and large-scale communities. The migration of the media experience to personal computers retains social viewing, but typically only via a non-social, strictly personal interface. This paper presents an architecture and implementation for media content selection, content (re)organization, and content sharing within a user community that is heterogeneous in terms of both participants and devices. In addition, our application allows the user to enrich the content as a differentiated personalization activity targeted to his/her peer-group. We describe the goals, architecture and implementation of our system in this paper. In order to validate our results, we also present results from two user studies involving disjoint sets of test participants.

Social television and user interaction

At first glance, the notion of social interactive television seems to be a tautology. Television watching has always been a social activity. People watch television together in their living rooms, and outside their homes they talk about last nights football match; and even call each other to recommend an interesting program. Unfortunately, until recently, research on social interactive television has been scarce. One limiting factor for the development of innovative services for the home is the interactive technology behind user interaction, which was limited to the remote control. Fortunately, a number of studies concentrate on extending interactive methods, for example by using contextual information. This article reviews the state of the art in these two directions: the social aspects of television and user interaction. We conclude with a research agenda for further research, which might transform current interactive television services into shared experiences.

The implications of program genres for the design of social television systems

In this paper, we look at how television genres can play a role in the use of social interactive television systems (social iTV). Based on a user study of a system for sending and receiving enriched video fragments to and from a range of devices, we discuss which genres are preferred for talking while watching, talking about after watching and for sending to users with different devices. The results show that news, soap, quiz and sport are genres during which our participants talk most while watching and are thus suitable for synchronous social iTV systems. For asynchronous social iTV systems film, news, documentaries and music programs are potentially popular genres. The plot structure of certain genres influences if people are inclined to talk while watching or not, and to which device they would send a video fragment. We also discuss how this impacts the design and evaluation of social iTV systems.

The Evolution of TV Systems, Content, and Users Toward Interactivity

Interactive TV research spans across a rather diverse body of scientific subfields. Research articles have appeared in several venues, such as multimedia, HCI, CSCW, UIST, user modeling, media and communication sciences. In this study, we explore the state-of-the-art and consider two basic issues: What is interactive TV research? Can it help us reinvent the practices of authoring, delivering, and watching TV? For this purpose, we have reviewed the research literature, as well as the industrial developments and identified three concepts that provide a high-level taxonomy of interactive TV research: (1) content editing, (2) content sharing, and (3) content control. We propose this simple taxonomy (edit–share–control) as an evolutionary step over the established hierarchical produce–deliver–consume paradigm. Moreover, we demonstrate how each disciplinary effort has contributed to and why the full potential of interactive TV has not yet been fulfilled. Finally, we describe how interdisciplinary approaches could provide solutions to some notable contemporary research issues.

Fragment, tag, enrich, and send: Enhancing social sharing of video

The migration of media consumption to personal computers retains distributed social viewing, but only via nonsocial, strictly personal interfaces. This article presents an architecture, and implementation for media sharing that allows for enhanced social interactions among users. Using a mixed-device model, our work allows targeted, personalized enrichment of content. All recipients see common content, while differentiated content is delivered to individuals via their personal secondary screens. We describe the goals, architecture, and implementation of our system in this article. In order to validate our results, we also present results from two user studies involving disjoint sets of test participants.

Automatic generation of video narratives from shared UGC

This paper introduces an evaluated approach to the automatic generation of video narratives from user generated content gathered in a shared repository. In the context of social events, end-users record video material with their personal cameras and upload the content to a common repository. Video narrative techniques, implemented using Narrative Structure Language (NSL) and ShapeShifting Media, are employed to automatically generate movies recounting the event. Such movies are personalized according to the preferences expressed by each individual end-user, for each individual viewing. This paper describes our prototype narrative system, MyVideos, deployed as a web application, and reports on its evaluation for one specific use case: assembling stories of a school concert by parents, relatives and friends. The evaluations carried out through focus groups, interviews and field trials, in the Netherlands and UK, provided validating results and further insights into this approach.

Enabling Composition-Based Video-Conferencing for the Home

This paper describes a videoconferencing system that meets performance constraints and functional requirements for use in consumer homes. Our system improves existing home technologies (such as video chat) by providing high-quality audiovisual communication, efficient encoding mechanisms, and low end-to-end delay. Moreover, the system includes a control interface that is capable of dynamically manipulating and compositing audiovisual content streams. This innovative architectural component is required for a domestic setting, where the television acts as the main screen and multiple people gather around it. Apart from the requirements and architecture, this paper analyses the performance of our system. The results validate our architectural decisions and provide a valuable input for further research in domestic videoconferencing.

Leveraging user impact: an architecture for secondary screens usage in interactive television

This paper reports on an architecture, and a working implementation, for using secondary screens in the interactive television environment. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the television experience, there are situations in which people perform as well a secondary task, whilst watching. In the living room, people surf the web, use email, and chat using one or many secondary screens. Instead of focusing on unrelated activities to television watching, the architecture presented in this paper aims at related activities, i.e., to leverage the user impact on the content being watched. After a comprehensive literature review and working systems analysis, the requirements for the secondary screen architecture are identified and modelled in the form of a taxonomy. The taxonomy is divided into three high-level categories: control, enrich, and share content. By control we refer to the decision what to consume and where to render it. In addition, the viewer can use the secondary screen for enriching media content and for sharing the enriched material. The architecture is validated based on the taxonomy and by an inspection of the available services. The final intention of our work is to leverage the viewers’ control over the consumed content in our multi-person, multi-device living rooms.

An architecture for non-intrusive user interfaces for interactive digital television

This paper presents an architecture for non-intrusive user interfaces in the interactive digital TV domain. The architecture is based on two concepts. First, the deployment of non-monolithic rendering for content consumption, which allows micro-level personalization of content delivery by utilizing different rendering components (e.g., sending video to the TV screen and extra information to a handheld device). Second, the definition of actions descriptions for user interaction, so that high-level user interaction intentions can be partitioned across a personalized collection of control components (e.g., handheld device). This paper introduces an over-all architecture to support micro-personalization and describes an implementation scenario developed to validate the architecture.