How open data can enhance
interactive television
Lyndon Nixon
STI International Consulting und
Research GmbH
lyndon.nixon@sti2.org

Overview
• Whats smart about our television?
• Open data and television
• Linking data within television

„Smart“ TVs
• Internet connectivity
coming as standard on
new televisions
• „SmartTV“ is NOT driving
new TV purchases
• TV apps fragmented and
LG SmartTV, pic courtesy
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/
2011/01/lg-smart-tv/
OTT (not connected to the
programming)
• Top app categories:
Samsung Smart TV
education & information (http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/files/201
1/05/5m-samsung-apps-1.jpeg)

Hybrid TV and
Web experience is
over two screens
Second screen apps show you related
content without disturbing the TV view
http://www.designbynotion.com/metamirror-next-generation-tv/

Consumers want content about
what they are watching
IntoNow or Shazam
identify what you are
watching and provide
associated content
A shade under three-quarters of TV
viewers with broadband are surfing the http://randymatheson.com/soci
al-tv-platform-miso-launches-
web while they watch, with 38 per cent of enhanced-experience-for-
dexter-premiere/
them discussing what they're watching on
social media. The proportion discussing
TV shows rises to 53 per cent if only the
16 to 23-year-old demographic is included.
-- Ovum survey, published in TheRegister,
6 October 2011

Market drivers:
• increasingly media content is consumed online
• people watch TV and surf the Web at the same time
• ubiquitous Internet leads to the expectation of ubiquitous
media consumption
• our media collections are moving into the cloud – from an
ownership model to a subscription/advertising model
Back end
Internet
technology Linked Media & Media Services
Front end
player and
device
Connected Media Experiences

We need to connect TV and Web
via shared, semantic, open data
“If computers can understand the meaning
behind the information they can
learn what we are interested in
and better help us find what we want.”
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/HatemMahmoud/web-30-the-semantic-web

Linked Data
• Use URIs as names of things
• Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
• When someone looks up an URI, provide useful information
• Include links to other URIs, so that they can discover more things

Put data behind services
Web APIs changed the
Data Content
face of Web applications
with new possibilities to
access and mashup data
from different sources Services encapsulate reusable
functionality over TV and Web
TV APIs could enable a new data and content
breed of TV application, e.g.
Interweaving of TV and Web
content based on Applications combine a UI with
a service based workflow
interlinked TV and Web
metadata

N-Screen demo

Linking data within television
• I see California but my weather app will only
tell me the weather in Bratislava. Why?

LinkedTV (www.linkedtv.eu)
 Vision: 12 Excellent Partners
 ubiquitously online cloud of Fraunhofer Eurecom
Networked Audio-Visual Content STI GMBH Condat
 decoupled from place, device or CERTH BEELD EN GELUID
source UEP Noterik
UMONS U. ST GALLEN
 Aim: CWI RBB
 provide interactive multimedia
service for non-professional end-
users
 focus television broadcast content
as seed videos

Goals
• Annotating audiovisual content with concepts
• Using that annotation to (semi-)automatically link parts of
audiovisual content to Web content
• Providing an interactive video experience for the user to
browse objects within the video program

Video annotation

Media interlinking Provenance Ontology for
Provenance
Management
ANALYSIS RESULTS (Support for segmentation)
Concepts,
keywords
LSCOM
Fragment Entities
(MFURI)
Open Annotation Core
Data Model
Wikipedia
Categories
Media
objects
WEB CONTENT ITEMS

Video interactivity
CONCEPT IN
PLAYER
Cubism Fauvism
Expressionism
FACETS / PROPERTIES OF CONTENT
CONCEPT ENRICHMENT

Implementation
A LinkedTV platform
External Platform Network Client will provide access
Editor
Browser
to the
LoD
Cloud Material
Variant functionalities of
selection,
Annotation
adjustment
PC / Tablet the LinkedTV
HTTP Browser experience:
HTML 5
LinkedTV
annotation, linking
Server
• Video Analysis HbbTV
and playout
• Enrichment
• Personalization Variant
• Delivery
Videos Broadcast
from
Scenarios
TV Set
Client LinkedTV
Repository
• Annotations HTTP
Browser
CE-HTML players will run
• Links to
external
Resources
across devices
(HTML5) or on
SmartTVs (HbbTV)

Scenarios
Scenario 1: Scenario 2: Scenario 3:
Interactive News Show Hyperlinked Documentary Media Arts
 Professional news  Cultural content from  Content and
content produced by S&V (1700 hours of Performance by
RBB cultural heritage AV- NUMEDIART Institute
 Seed content: local content under CCL)
for New Media Art
news show "rbb  Seed content:
Aktuell" Technology
"Antique Roadshow"
 Mons: European
Capital of Culture 2015.
18

ConnectME (www.connectme.at)

ConnectME annotation tool

ConnectME hypervideo player

Conclusions
• Open data and APIs for TV and the Web could enable new Smart TV applications
which appeal to consumers and drive Smart TV technology
• We need common schemas and semantics to be able to hybrid-ize TV and Web data
• Todays „smart“ apps are more OTT and don‘t integrate well with what the viewer is
currently watching
• TV programming needs granular annotations available to services to directly enrich
TV with additional Web content
• TV platforms today can only partially implement hypervideo. We need more HTML5 or
native support!
• Research challenges include lowering the annotation cost, controlling the
content enrichments and providing intuitive UIs on the TV.
Thanks for your attention! Stay tuned:
• www.connectme.at
• www.linkedtv.eu @linkedtv
Dr. Lyndon Nixon lyndon.nixon@sti2.org