Modeling and delivering heterogeneous audiovisual content for group consumption

Abstract

The abundance of broadcast material, especially when it becomes available from a variety of content providers, makes the choice of a program genre and adaptation of presentation options to the preferences of a user, a welcome feature of the modern-day TV viewing experience. From a technical point of view, assembling and transmitting such heterogeneous content is in itself a daunting task, especially when intellectual property rights issues should be tackled. In addition to this, while there are a lot of options for filtering content with respect to the preferences of a single user, the common or aggregated choice of a group is hardly ever taken into account. Considering the fact that TV viewing and multimedia consumption in general are essentially a social activity, systems which package, filter and rank the available content or propose similar content to what is currently viewed should also integrate mechanisms to model group dynamics. This article presents an integrated, end-to-end architecture which assembles multimedia material, respecting the IPR of the content provider, and delivers it to a client-side mechanism which considers the preferences of all the viewers currently watching to filter and rank the available programs. In order to respect the established methods of producing content, this system utilizes concepts from adopted standards (MPEG7, MPEG21) to model processes and represents data and relations between the different entities of the system.