ENHANCED TV APPLICATION FEATURES

Current interactive television standards do not pause the video while the viewer interacts with the enhanced television application. As a result the story that the content producers are showing gets lost during this interaction. With incorporation of PVR technology, the Sony/WGBH system pauses the video during viewer interaction with the enhanced TV application and therefore maintains the story continuity between viewer interactions.



Playback

One of the main features of enhanced television is to permit the viewer to interact with the system but still provide a complete TV viewing experience. The application allows the viewers to organize the program/show clips based on preferences; However content producers prefer that the viewer be able to watch the clips in the order of production. So, to satisfy the viewer and the producer, the Sony/WGBH system supports three types of content playback modes:

Linear Playback - plays episode in the order created by producers.



Preferred Playback - Plays episode based on the viewer's explicit preferences. The system reorders the segments of the episode based on viewer's category preference.



Playlist playback - Plays segment of ARS episode in the order created by the viewer.



Extras

Enhanced television facilitates viewers with features such as gathering additional information about program/show clips. While viewing a clip, the viewer can browse extra information about it and then resume playing the clip. The extra information for the clip can be in the form of text, still images and/or another clip.



Sony/WGBH ARS application can display appraiser biography, antique speak and tips of the trade as extra information associated with clips.



Search

Content search is an important feature of enhanced television that supports PVR technology. The search capability for an application is driven by the availability of the metadata for content pieces. Availability of exhaustive metadata will allow the enhanced TV viewer to specify accurate search criteria which will proliferate the exact content piece he/she is looking for.

ARS application provides the viewer with keyword driven search as shown in the screen shot. For instance, in the screen shot the viewer has fired search on the keyword "american". The content on demand system running under this application returns a list of content related to the keyword. The viewer can then perform following operations on the search result:

View - Viewer can play a clip, when finished playing, control comes back to search results .

Add to Playlist - Viewer can choose to add one or more clips to the Playlist.

Sort - Viewer can sort clips.



Preferences

Personalization feature adds another dimension to enhanced television viewing. The ARS application allows a viewers to explicitly set their category based preferences.

ARS content metadata allows their grouping into Categories. Content on demand system can generate these categories dynamically or they may be a static; either way the categories are available to the enhanced television application through the underlying content on demand system. Each viewer can rate the categories according to his/her preference. The category preferences for individual viewer are used for generating Preferred playlist.

On the ARS preferences screen content categories are listed in the alphabetical order. A viewer can specify the preference for each category. Within each category, the preference rating from -1 to 3 can be selected. The content on demand system then uses the category preferences for sorting and generating preferred playlist. The ARS application has a set of 23 categories for viewer preference setting.

Next section: Metadata

Revised Tuesday, 15-Apr-2003 07:07:48 CDT - h © 2000 - 2003 Local Enhancement Collaborative & .