11288 NexTV:
New media consumption in Extended interactive TeleVision environment

Objectives:

The project aims at:

• carrying out studies on new business models for interactive digital television made possible by new multimedia technologies;
• producing technical specification for an end-to-end system integrating the technologies needed by the above business models (e.g. MPEG-2, HTML, MPEG-4, XML, etc.);
• contributing this specification to international initiatives (MPEG, IETF, DVB, W3C, Web3D, AIC-I);
• developing and extending software for the creation, delivery and consumption of the new interactive services;
• creating applications demonstrating the new services and validating the tools
• validating the overall results of the project through an end-to-end experimental set up.

Description of work:

The project will undergo a first phase of analysis and specification of business models, where the different actors of the interactive television business and their relationships will be identified. Their requirements will be studied, and according to them, at least two applications will be chosen. An application is an interactive multimedia service, using standard formats (MPEG-2, HTML etc) plus some enhancement information. The service is created and consumed using tools that run on commercial and experimental platforms, mainly PC based.

The business models studied in this project will specify a framework which will allow for the identification of robust relationship between key variables, and at the same time be flexible enough to be able to be applied to a fast changing business environment.

The applications that will be chosen and the relating requirements will guide the integration of the tools in a complete end-to-end prototype. The Project will not develop from scratch these tools, but will use background developments from the partners, standard reference software (e.g. IM1 for MPEG) or open source code.

Integration of technology will require modification and improvement of this code, realisation of new plug-ins, development of translators, etc.

The project will follow standardisation activities and consensus forming for a (MPEG, AIC-I, DVB, IETF) in order to bring updates to the project and to contribute extensions allowing the targeted technology integration.

The realisation of the experimental application and the use of test beds already in place at the time the Project will reach its maturity will allow the whole chain, including the final application, to be tested in place with real users. The users feedback will allow to gather essential information about the possible actual realisation of the business models as well as the relevance of the new interactive multimedia content that they will have consumed.

Expected results:

Milestones are mainly deliverables, which will cover the business model area (identification of roles, relationships, requirements, costs, prices), the technological area (S/W tools for the terminal, server, and content production),

The standardisation activity (contributions to MPEG, IETF, etc.), the area of evaluation of user perspective (report on final tests with real users). Main result of the project is a comprehensive study of a new generation interactive TV.

Contact Point

Participants

Planning

Keywords: Interactive, Television, Virtual