Mar
7
LinkedTV is pleased to announce that its position paper “Linking Web Content Seamlessly with Broadcast Television: Issues and Lessons Learned” (PDF) has been accepted for presentation at the next W3C Web and TV workshop in Munich on March 13, 2014.
The workshop is subtitled ‘Aligning Global Standards and what’s next for Web and TV’, and LinkedTV certainly believes a closer, more relevant convergence of TV and Web content is one of those things which is “what’s next for TV”. Currently, anything from 58 to 77% TV viewers are also using a second screen on an Internet-connected device at the same time as TV viewing, and one survey found 40% of viewers using that screen to follow what was going on – with Google the first place to search for program-related information.
However, viewers have limited means to conduct many of the information searches they desire, e.g. finding out which painting is hanging on the wall behind a character is nearly impossible to formulate as a textual query to Google, such searches do not occur. On the other hand, providing such links as an additional service via connected devices can be a means to create new value for original television content.
Linked Television seeks to address this by providing media owners such as broadcasters an integrated Platform for ingesting, analysing and annotating their video material, and on playout adding links from video to related Web content which can be presented to the viewer on their second screen via the LinkedTV multiscreen toolkit.
However, this functionality relies on support of the “Open Web Platform”. If LinkedTV is to become a truly cross-platform and cross-device technology for enriching the TV experience with links to Web content in the household, support for LinkedTV-ready Web specifications such as HTML5 and APIs for device discovery, content synchronisation and Media Fragments need to be part of the next generation of Consumer Electronics devices (and not just PCs being used like TVs).
We hope our presentation and subsequent discussions will be the start of a process to bring Linked Television into households via device support for new specifications, many of which are being pushed by the W3C.
