Television Linked To The Web

The project is an integrated and practical approach towards experiencing Networked Media in the Future Internet. The Web’s original success was the underlying hypertext paradigm built into HTML. Hypermedia has been pursued for quite a while as an extension of the hypertext approach towards video information. But it needs complex video analysis algorithms and is still an issue of research. Television Linked To The Web (LinkedTV) provides a novel practical approach to Future Networked Media. It is based on four phases: annotation, interlinking, search, and usage (including personalization, filtering, etc.). The result will make Networked Media more useful and valuable, and it will open completely new areas of application for Multimedia information on the Web.

After 42 months of research and development completed by 12 partners across Europe, the LinkedTV project has produced services, tools and documents, enabling a new generation of TV applications. From the beginning, the project aimed at making the vision of Linked Television become reality.

Linked Television is the seamless interweaving of TV and Web content into a single, integrated experience. It is watching the news and getting background information on the stories; it is seeing a painting in a TV programme and identifying the artist and the museum where it hangs. LinkedTV is making this possible and cost-effective for content owners and broadcasters by offering a Platform, which handles the complete end-to-end workflow of video analysis and enrichment as well as personalising to each viewer.

The innovative technology identifies the concepts and topics in the TV programme, as well as selecting the most appropriate information and content to present for each concept and topic. Manual curation checks and complements the accuracy of the automated services. Dedicated client applications can be built retrieving the programme enrichments from the Platform, eased by using LinkedTV’s developer toolkit to handle presentation on and synchronisation across screens and devices.

The LinkedTV technology is based on research results that extended the state-of-the-art in many areas. New algorithms and methods for automatic decomposition of audiovisual content, the association of content segments with objects and scene labels, text and audio analysis and event and instance-based labelling of content segments have been developed to provide annotations on fragment level. The annotated media fragments are further enhanced by methods of named entitiy recognition and enriched with additional content discovered by Web mining approaches. Research on personalisation and contextualisation resulted in technologies that ensure the relevance of the enrichments for the consumer.

With several in-depth user studies the project gathered valuable insights on the interests of TV consumers. This knowledge and also the acquired experience in tool development and platform management are exploited by LinkedTV partners in future projects and consultancy offers.

Research results, knowledge and the LinkedTV technology were already successfully shown at events like IFA and IBC and will be further disseminated in future publications, at conferences and workshops, industry events and exhibitions.