Production Technology Seminar 2009 - EBU Technical

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easily zap across the channels and with the remote control respond to requests and messages from the
ORF production team.
The interactivity took place in all levels of production and consumption [18].
� On the viewer side with: of course his/her remote control, the mini EPG [13]+[16], his/her responses
to Voting [20] and to Switch [20], and by 'Skyping' with the production team.
� On the production side:
o A 'Feedback Application' interface displaying the use of the channels [35] and the viewers'
responses [36].
o A 'Recommender tool' [40]-[41], a search & retrieval tool based on the information provided by
the system.
o The producer making informed decisions about which sports to broadcast live or which content of
high interest to repeat. Patterns began to form in the voting and rating of content that indicated high
interest in the behind the scenes action of sports events, this also included the behind the scenes of
the production broadcast itself [15]. The result was the production of new content „on-the-fly‟ such as
studio guest interviews, documentaries about sports personalities and interviews with the production
team [14] or visits to viewers [15].
o Moderators on a dedicated channel for permanent, informal and spontaneous live moderation. It
soon took on the form of a home channel where viewers would return either for a break from the
action or for an update on the action across the 5 channels [22] or to hear what the other viewers had
to say. The producer also relied on the studio channel for immediate reaction to patterns in viewer
behaviour such as a major switch to the medal ceremony involving an Austrian athlete.
The core of the system was an 'Intelligent Media Framework' using an 'Intelligent Content Model' [26]
which integrated the knowledge about the content sources (live events, production archives), the staging
concepts (When do we switch - In which way? - How do we communicate? – Do we treat the main topic
now on the 4 channels? Do we spread our topics?) and the information coming from the supporting tools.
For generating metadata the Fraunhofer Institute developed a 'Human annotation' interface [42].
Results of the field trial 47 . LIVE was “on air” for a total of 33 hours per channel, in which a total of 254
onscreen interactive elements were produced. On average more than half of all viewers took regular
advantage of the interactive elements to switch to dramatic events on another channel or to vote or rate
the content on screen. 87% of viewers participated in the trial on at least two weekends. Overall
satisfaction with the broadcast was very high. In fact 63% of viewers who participated on all three
weekends were very happy with the broadcast [61]. Nearly all of the respondents in the follow-up user
survey indicated that they would like to use such an interactive TV service in the future.
47 http://www.ist-live.org/promo-material/promo-material/trialfolder_s.pdf
© EBU 2009 / Production Technology seminar / January 27 - 29, 2009
Reproduction prohibited without written permission of EBU TECHNICAL & EBU TRAINING