Television linked to the Web

Television is changing.

Already at the end of this decade, it will be radically transformed. With ubiquitous online access to audiovisual contents, consumption on multiple screens and even more devices and convergence with the Web, the broadcast TV market is challenged and looking for solutions. LinkedTV provides technology, knowledge and experience for content owners and TV broadcasters.

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. Almost all information is available on the project website and companies interested in access to the technology can find out more at the showcase website (http://showcase.linkedtv.eu).