Watching in Public

In this chapter the authors present a field study of BBC Big Screens Public Space Broadcasting initiative. Under this initiative, large screens have been installed in several urban locations across the United Kingdom and used to screen a range of television content and interactive applications. The chapter discusses a number of different findings and themes. These include different types of screen use such as viewing of standard television content, event-based use of the screens and interactive use of the screen. The chapter then goes on to discuss the content in relationship to its placement in a particular local context. Following this, the chapter looks at how architectural features shape the way the screens are used and impact on audience behaviour. Finally the authors explore issues of health and safety that impact on content choice and pragmatics of scheduling.

Getting to Know Social Television

This chapter presents results from an ongoing social television project, in the context of other research in the field. The authors give a detailed description of the STV prototype used in their research, and summarize their studies, which provide the findings explained in the rest of the chapter. Three major research focuses are identified, namely evaluation and validation of Social TV systems, communication modality comparison, and detailed observation of user behaviors. Based on the findings in these areas, the authors list three major open questions and challenges for the field: multi-user support, new equipment requirements, and the creation of distinct and unique social television experiences. Finally, the chapter suggests that the emphasis within social television may be moving from research to design, implementation and deployment.

Interactive TV Together

One of the challenges in the world of interactive digital TV is to improve the user experience facilitated by these services. In this chapter, the authors discuss their approach towards reaching this goal, which is to integrate community and interactivity services (“Web 2.0”-style) of third-party providers from out side the world of IPTV into an IPTV service offering (e.g., services on the public Internet, and services offered by telco operators and end-users). The foundation of this work is an open service infrastructure that facilitates this form of integration. The authors discuss the set of service enablers that make up the infrastructure and present a working prototype implementation that serves as a proof of concept of their approach. They also outline four possible scenarios for the future of IPTV, which are based on a trend analysis and form the basis for developing business models made possible by their infrastructure.

Television Content Enrichment and Sharing

This chapter reports on the Ambulant Annotator, a middleware extension for Personal Digital Recorders (PDR), in the form of a lightweight authoring tool, which allows the viewer to personalize television content and share it with others. Traditionally, social interactive television research has focused on the provision of synchronous communication mechanisms between distributed peers in the form of direct communication channels (text or audio chats) or distributed control (joint television watching experience). This chapter considers a broader approach that enhances the connectedness between users by providing video sharing capabilities. The Ambulant Annotator empowers viewer-side enrichment of multimedia content in the form of video fragmentation, fragments annotation and enrichment. Once the user has created his personalized enriched version of the video content, the Ambulant Annotator provides mechanisms to share it with his social network by using asynchronous communication technologies. The video manipulation mechanisms presented in this chapter does not modify the original video material, but are encoded as separate overlays in such a way that Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions on content reuse are respected.

Asynchronous Communication

With the advent of digital video recorders and video-on-demand services, the way in which we consume media is undergoing a fundamental change. People today are less likely to watch shows at the same time, let alone the same place. As a result, television viewing which was once a social activity has been reduced to a passive, isolated experience. CollaboraTV was designed to address this new mode of television viewing by directly supporting asynchronous communication. We demonstrated its ability to support this communal viewing experience through a lab study and a month-long field study. Our studies show that users understand and appreciate the utility of asynchronous interaction, are enthusiastic about CollaboraTV’s engaging social communication primitives and value implicit show recommendations from friends. Our results both provide a compelling demonstration of a social television system and raise new challenges for social television communication modalities.

Examining the Roles of Mobility in Social TV

Mobile TVs have been available for many years, without ever becoming very popular. Moreover, the first wave of research has been mostly concerned with technology and standards, which are necessary to ensure interoperability and market acceptance. Although, there has been a significant body of computer supported co-operative work (CSCW) and mobile human-computer interaction (HCI) research findings, there is limited investigation in the context of leisure activities, such as TV. In this chapter, the author proposes three concepts that drive the main paths for research and practice in mobile and social TV: (1) Mobile TV as a content format, (2) Mobile TV as user behavior and (3) Mobile TV as interaction terminal. Further research should elaborate on these three concepts and highlight the cultural impact of mobile TV.

From 2BeOn Results to New Media Challenges for Social (i)TV

This chapter focuses on traditional and emergent challenges for the Social (i)TV area focusing on explaining the development and evaluation of one of the first Social iTV prototypes and looking at the challenges new media is introducing to this research field. The authors begin by explaining the conceptualization, development and evaluation process of the 2BeOn system and continue with the most important results from it’s evaluation with a particular focus on the results that can be important when developing any Social iTV platform. In the last part of the chapter recent developments in the broadcast of TV and Audiovisual content, namely considering the Internet as a medium, are addressed. In this scope authors propose a categorization of emergent online distribution platforms along with a set of social activities users perform on those platforms. Taking in consideration some of the challenges surrounding the presented scenario the chapter ends with the conceptualization of UMCA, a system that could increase social interaction activities performed during the consumption of online AV/TV content.

Audience Participation in Television and Internet

This chapter seeks to evaluate the attitudes and practices of media participation amongst young Portuguese aged between 12-18 years, with a particular focus on content creation and sharing through media and information and communication technologies (ICT). Audience participation in television and internet will be addressed, having as basis the results and findings of three empirical studies integrated in the PhD research project of the author, namely: an ethnographical study about the usage of media and ICT usage by 10 families conducted at their own domestic contexts, a quantitative survey about the usage of media and ICT by young people aged 12-18 with a total of 962 respondents and, finally, an evaluation study of a participatory media format which was tested and evaluated by 77 teenagers from three different schools. The main objective is to better understand the attitudes and behaviors of young people in Portugal towards the practices of creation and sharing digital content through media and ICT, providing empirical data about the range and frequency of experiences of content creation by this specific population, as well as their interest and adherence to participatory media formats.

Inducing User Cooperation in Peer-to-Peer Television

Television and the Internet have proven to be a popular combination for both broadcasters and viewers. Because of this popularity they are increasingly facing the consequences of central bottlenecks, which could be overcome by taking a different approach: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology. However, P2P systems can only be successful with as much cooperation among as many users as possible. This chapter explains how this cooperation is hard to enforce, and how inducing it might be more successful. Relevant psychological theories are listed that can be used to induce this user cooperation, along with possible applications of cooperation inducing mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer Television (P2P-TV) systems. The authors aim to provide practical criteria along which these mechanisms can be evaluated on their contribution to social activity in P2P-TV systems.

ConnectTV

The combination of content and communication has proven to be a powerful and successful concept. Many online services not only allow for consumption of content, but also give their users the possibility to exchange views on the content among each other. YouTube for instance, not only allows its visitors to watch movie clips, but also to discuss them, to review them, and to send recommendations about them. Electronic Program Guides on the web more and more offer social functionality in addition to listing television programs; thus integrating content and communication. Users can discuss their favorite TV shows in forums that are organized around TV programs. ConnecTV is a social interactive TV service that combines communication with watching television. It makes watching TV a social activity, and aims to give its users the feeling of ‘watching together’. ConnecTV was developed in the B@Home research project (B@Home). Among the project’s goals was an investigation of the type of services that will become feasible when ‘fiber to the home’ is widely introduced, giving households broadband internet connections with significantly more capacity than today. Although the functional design of ConnecTV was carried out in close cooperation with experts from the media industry, the real test for end-user acceptance would be a field trial with the service. In addition, a trial would reveal the effects on the users’ viewing behavior, and would give insight in how to make a positive business case around ConnecTV. In 2007 ConnecTV was implemented and a field trial was held in about 50 households in the town of Enschede, in The Netherlands. In literature, many systems have been proposed that combine social networks with consuming content in general, or with watching TV specifically. Examples are AmigoTV (Coppens, Trappeniers, & Godon, 2006), 2BeOn (Abreu, Almeida, & Branco, 2001), SocialTV (Harboe, Massey, & Metcalf, 2006), ChaT.V. (Fink, Covell, & Baluja, 2006) and CollaboraTV (Harrison & Amento, 2007). Although some of ConnecTV’s functionality can be found in these services as well, other functions (like following a buddy, or switching to the most popular channel) are new. The main contribution of the research described in this chapter though lays in the field trial of ConnecTV. With some of the above-mentioned social TV services field trials have been performed (e.g. (Harboe, Massey, & Metcalf, 2006)), but they were limited in size (typically two or three groups), and did not use extensive logging of user activities. To our knowledge, a field trial of a social TV service at the scale of the ConnecTV field trial with such extensive logging, surveys and experience sampling has not been performed before. This chapter starts with explaining the functionality of ConnecTV and its implementation. The main focus of this chapter is the field trial: the set-up, the research questions, the research methodology and the results of the field trial are discussed extensively. The chapter concludes with a description of the most viable approaches for a positive business case, and gives an outline for future work.