This report discusses a Sony/WGBH collaborative development activity to build a framework for developing content driven enhanced applications and test that framework using a sample enhanced application. The framework combined video on demand (VOD) and personal video recorder (PVR) technology to enable more flexible deployment of advanced content services regardless of where the content is stored. The system should also support any form of digital content including video, still images, and text files.
SONY/WGBH ENHANCED TV APPLICATION
The project had several goals. One goal was to understand and define the data requirements and functional components for a Content-On-Demand-System to search and playback content stored on local or remote content servers. Another goal was to develop a joint-metadata model that enabled a rich feature set for enhanced applications.
The concept was validated by developing an initial prototype enhanced application based on an episode of Antiques Roadshow that runs on top of the content framework. The completed system demonstration targets interactive TV content, leveraging stored video for a flexible clip-oriented viewer experience. Among the unique features of the system is the ability to pause the primary video while exploring associated content, as well as integrating with a unified preference engine that supports explicit and implicit specification. The entire system was demonstrated at the Broadband Plus Show (formerly Western Cable Show) in December 2002.
The remainder of the content of this report discusses the platform issues/development concepts, system features, architecture, metadata, and observations that resulted from the cooperative development effort. The material is designed to provide a general understanding of the overall issues and requirements for developing enhanced rich media applications. Given such information a developer can build enhanced applications with the same types of features.
