Direct Integration of Collaboration Into Broadcast Content Formats

JOHANNES KEPLER UNIVERSITAT¨ LINZ JKU Technisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät Direct Integration of Collaboration into Broadcast Content Formats DISSERTATION zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktorin der Technischen Wissenschaften im Doktoratsstudium der Technischen Wissenschaften Eingereicht von: Dipl.-Ing.in Sabine Lösch Angefertigt am: Institut für Telekooperation Beurteilung: Univ.Prof.in Dr.in Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis Associate Professor Dr. Artur Lugmayr Linz, Oktober 2015 Sabine Lösch: Direct Integration of Collaboration into Broadcast Content Formats, © October 2015 To David, Eva and Jakob. TheACKNOWLEDGMENTS first and most sincere acknowledgment is to my husband David. He is my inspiration and my tower of strength. Without him I would not have been able to reach this point in my academic career. The second acknowledgment is to my beloved kids Jakob and Eva, who always give me a break from research work back to everyday life and help me see things from a child’s perspective. For substantial professional and mental support I would particularly like to thank my supervisor Professor Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis, who always believed in me and my work. She motivated and encouraged me, even after 3 years of parental leave, to finish this thesis. The same is of course true for Professor Artur Lugmayr for his comprehensive and most helpful feedback and for having endless and productive discussions in Finland and in the Linz main railway station, which helped me gain a new perspective on topics I was stuck on. Particularly important was my mentor Professor Susanne Saminger-Platz. She pushed me to keep trying, and aside from academic topics even helped me to balance two toddlers and a PhD. Furthermore I owe special thanks to my colleagues Professor Wieland Schwinger and Professor Ismail Khalil, and all other colleagues of the Department of Telecooperation whom I had the privilege for cooperating with during the past couple years. I also owe special thanks to our secretary Angela Kohl, who always had a sympathetic ear and was supportive in non-academic issues. Finally I would like to thank my colleague Dr. Pauliina Tuomi for her straightforward cooperation in 2011 / 2012. Besides professional support, my parents deserve thanks and honor for supporting me throughout my entire academic career. Without their support, this would barely have been possible. Other very important sources of mental support were my sister Elke, my brother-in-law Clemens, and my beloved godson Thomas who can always make me laugh and take my mind of things. iv DuringABSTRACT the past decade broadcasting technology shifted from analog towards digital. The new digital technology enabled new possibilities for collaborative program formats and interactivity. The shift to digital broadcast technology has increased the consumer’s interest in more interactive applications beyond simple teletext solutions. These new technologies invited the viewer to play a more active or participatory role in TV. Simple examples are i.e. discussing broadcast content in forums, gaining additional information about the program content on the Internet, or working collaboratively with other content consumers i.e. via the implicit exchange of consumer behavioral patterns to personalize program content (e.g. Netflix). Broadcasters followed the consumer trends, and started to offer more and more solutions on program format level to offer a more participatory, inviting, and collaborative television experience. Program formats that enabled an increased participation gained popularity, and range far beyond reality, casting, or voting program formats. Today two different major developments are noticeable: 1) research and development focused mainly on the development of proprietary television platforms that provide social interaction and collaboration between views; 2) industry on the other hand focused on the development of participatory broadcast content formats deployed on television platforms accompanying the main TV platform such as e.g. second screen principles or web based media forms to invite the audience to engage with content. Despite experimental participatory program formats, transmedia television content, and the new trends on Internet or IPTV platforms, participation in program content, engaging with audiences, and collaboration seems to have been a minor trend. In conclusion, today’s TV platforms provide mostly only simple collaborative services attached to broadcast content, which are rather designed to view TV content passively than to actually participate in program formats. This poses a problem and prevents the development of more complex collaborative and social interaction, as on the one hand synchronization is lost, and on the other hand media disruption happens when the audience has to shift to parallel platforms. This thesis works exactly challenges this fact, and attempts to develop participatory program formats and platforms supporting collaborative and social activity. Linking content formats, platforms, and audience participation, and which technological solutions exist to create this link is major concern within the scope of this thesis. Thus this thesis investigated and provided solutions which 1) enable the development of more complex collaborative and social interaction on the platform TV; 2) synchronization models for content presenta- tion, interaction, collaboration, secondary and tertiary screens, and streaming technologies; 3) includes metadata definitions to encode meta-information about the content structure, it’s collaboration capabilities, and exchange format between consumer, broadcasters and other 3rd parties; 4) defines a Collaborative Broadcast Content Format (CBF) to enable this type of collaboration; 5) defines a generic reference architecture to integrate the CBF into a TV stream; 6) integrated the proposed reference architecture into the development of applications and services, including an editing environment to create collaborative content v and its impact on the narrative; and 7) validates the applicability of the implementations with self-developed benchmarks. In short, the thesis focuses on bridging the gap between the wide variety of broadcast program formats, content formats, and collaborative activity by providing the required technical solutions. To link those, a metadata format is developed to be included into the broadcast content format and processed on the consumer’s side. The metadata trigger the collaborative activity and act as a coordinating unit between the collaborators. The thesis aimed at the provision of a generic reference architecture to avoid proprietary solutions, and therefore adopted solutions based on existing standardized solutions as proposed by DVB or MPEG. The developed generic reference architecture shall act as framework for the direct integration of collaborative activities into existing broadcast content, technologies, and formats. The architecture identifies and defines the components, interfaces, standards, technologies, design patters to support the implementation of a collaborative broadcast system. The reference architecture includes a professional broadcast environment, including the needs of content producers as well as consumers. One special feature of the architecture is the tight alignment with the business lifecycle of collaborative broadcast content formats, and integrates related needs and requirements. Besides the implementation of the generic collaborative broadcast architecture, several applications and services have been developed to demonstrate technical feasibility. The application “CBF Metadata Editor” illustrates how program content tagged with metadata can be created. By utilizing this tool, two broadcast services - namely “Collaborative Voting App” and “Collaborative Gaming App” - have been developed to tie broadcast content with collaborative activity. To demonstrate the practical applicability of the research, the collaborative broadcast format “Against the Others - Interactive” illustrated how audiences can be ’invited’ to become an interactive and collaborative part of a broadcast show. Sev- eral implementations have been tested against a developed benchmark, which has been developed within the scope of the thesis work. The benchmark included criteria such as resource utilization, reliability, performance, real-time metrics, and time requirements. The benchmark allowed to validate the proposed architecture including its applications, and tested the suitability of the application of metadata as solution to tie broadcast content and collaborative activity in real-time critical broadcasting systems. A feature based evaluation allowed the comparison of the proposed concepts to other market available solutions, or research results. To conclude, this thesis demonstrated the feasibility, as well as it proposed a technical solution to tie broadcast platforms, content, and collaborative activity with the proposed reference architecture together. It clearly demonstrated, that the development of a technical solution fulfilling several broadcast related requirements is possible and feasible. It also demonstrated the real-time deployment of such services on practical examples and applications. As the broadcasting sector currently still undergoes a re-orientation phase in times of IPTV, Internet TV, and other distribution format, the results of the thesis enrich the possible future pathway of the medium TV by other forms of broadcast formats. If these will succeed, will remain with

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