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Leuven.


The final keynote for this first day at EuroITV 2009 is by Marc Hassenzahl, whose focus is on user experience. He begins by noting that technology needs to be humane; it needs to be adapted to people's actual uses. This is even more important as the boundaries between tools and content are blurring; however, the main tool for researching this remains human-technology interaction research, which focusses simply on usability engineering, on whether tools work.

But is functionality everything? What about the experiential dimension - the hedonic perspective that needs to be considered in addition to the pragmatic one? Both sides need to be considered: a product needs to provide value and fulfil task needs, but must also feel right and be enjoyable to use. This is now slowly being realised in human-technology interaction theory.

Leuven.


The final speaker in this session at EuroITV 2009 is George Lekakos, whose interest is in interactive television advertising. What opportunities for new developments exist here? In the first place, any new models need to increase advertising effectiveness factors - and for interactive advertising, there are also a number of normally less important factors (for groups watching TV together, interactive ads may be less effective as only one group member holds the remote and can control the interactive content.

Presentation models are also important - from impulsive response ('press the red button') to advertising microsites that pop up on screen in addition to the continuing programme (which is sized down), to miniDAL (a small dedicated advertiser location, delivered for example as an overlapping picture in picture) or full-blown DALs delivered as exclusive channels. There is no sufficient research on advertising effectiveness for these models, and a focus mainly on the screen splitting approach so far.

Leuven.


Skylla Janssen is next at EuroITV 2009. She also wonders about the future TV, and poses the question of whether there's a space for user involvement in the participatory design of new television formats and content.

I'm afraid I missed out on blogging a good part of her presentation as I had to reboot my laptop - but she presented a nice survey of TV producers' attitudes towards incorporating user-generated content and ideas (as you'd expect, such input was valued only where it generated money - think SMS voting in reality TV - or where users were seen as providing unskilled labour in creating and maintaining fan communities around mainstream programming.

Leuven.


We move on to Janez Zaletelj, whose paper at EuroITV 2009 focusses on real-time viewer feedback in TV production, here in the context of the 2008 Olympic Games. Traditionally, in sports broadcasting, broadcast directors have no feedback from viewers whatsoever; adding such feedback channels, however, enables them to check the viewer acceptance of content, make changes accordingly, and otherwise communicate with the audience.

The project used IPTV for this purpose; four interlinked sub-channels carryng different content and allowing user votes as well as information flashes from the producers, were made available within the overall Olympic Games channel. The system was able to gather viewer statistics on each of the channels and on what content ws being watched, and this was able to be correlated with viewer profiles (gathered in some detail for the specific purpose of this prototype study).

Leuven.


We begin the next session at EuroITV 2009 with Gijs Geleijnse from Philips. He notes that many of the new innovations in the interactive TV area will require new user interfaces - for example for text entry on television screens. Ideally this would happen without adding yet another device to the living room (i.e., not another remote control...).

Gijs's study examined a number of options for this - multi-tap (SMS style), an on-screen keyboard, and a regular computer keyboard. It evaluated the usability as well as the enjoyability of such technologies - and the standard computer keyboard won out on both measures.

Leuven.


My own presentation at EuroITV 2009 was next. As always, I'll try to add the audio as soon as possible, but for now, here's the Powerpoint with audio track, and a link to the full paper:

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Leuven.


The third speaker in this session at EuroITV 2009 is Stephen Lynn, who shifts our focus to using multimedia annotations to provide a different sports viewing experience, initially for American Football. Currently, such TV content is accessed mainly still through the digital video recorder (DVR), and its most commonly used functionality remains fast forward and rewind, which is often frustrating to use.

Using annotations, there may be an opportunity to move towards other, more salient forms of random access to specific points in a game - accessing and rewatching specific plays or game phases, for example (also from multiple camera angles), and accessing the game statistics for a specific play, for example. At the same time, such controls must still be able to be used in a 'lean-back' mode that is typical for the conventional television experience.

Leuven.


Vivian Genaro Motti is the next speaker at EuroITV 2009, and she continues the semantic theme. She begins, though, by highlighting the shift towards ubiquitous computing, which is allows for a capture-and-access process - capturing everything in the environment of the user, and accessing this in the context of later use (used e.g. to document meetings). Such material may then also be further annotated, of course, augmenting captured video with comments, information, and other details.

This, then, enables user collaboration, even a kind of social TV based on iDTV technologies. This utilises a watch-and-comment (WAC) approach which captures individual user comments and generates annotated interactive video files. A technology developed by the present project, the WaCTool, uses digital ink, text, and voice for the creation of such metadata, provides text-based chat functionality, and generates annotated video files. Such collaboration enables group communication and creates enriched content, which may be useful in a variety of contexts.

Leuven.


The post-lunch session here at EuroITV 2009 is the one that my paper is in as well, so I've refrained from sampling the fine Belgian beers available during lunch. We start with Marcelo Manzato, whose interest is in the peer annotation of multimedia content. Digital television makes it easier for user to interact with multimedia content, and this is happening for example through YouTube and similar services, of course, as well as through the proliferation of mobile devices (and the necessary adaptation and personalisation of content for such contexts).

Leuven.


Finally in this session at EuroITV 2009, we come to Sander Smit. His interest is in interactive networked multimedia experiences, combining TV, Web, and mobile communication. Such combination is not easy given the different histories of such technologies, and yet there is a strong push towards convergence here. Additionally, there is a push towards open service models, away from the proprietary telecom-driven frameworks of the past.

This involves the roll-out of personalisation and social networking elements in many contexts, using a variety of technological channels (Internet, mobile, broadcasting) to access available content and services. Such services themselves constitute a bundle of previously separate services, which are now combined and offered as a single service proposition to users. As a result, the service domain will become increasingly complex - which not least also means that managing information, privacy, and security becomes increasingly difficult. On the flip side, there are also substantial new opportunities for advertising.