A collaborative TV-Internet application model to enrich TV viewing experience in a pervasive way

This paper presents an application model for augmenting TV viewing experience. The augmentation consists of additional media resources, which are linked to the Web according to the user profile and to TV metadata. Instead of asking the user for such data, a distributed software system captures them non-intrusively, processes the user and TV program context, and automatically searches for and delivers the context-aware resources to the viewer either on the TV screen or on a second screen. The use of TV metadata as context data is a remarkable feature in this work. Such metadata are carried in the MPEG-2 Transport Stream, which is part of the major digital TV systems in the world. This work deals with problems such as inconsistency of TV metadata, and ineffectiveness of Web search, which could frustrate the viewer's enriched experience. The research indicates that context-aware applications in the television domain should strongly take into account TV metadata captured opportunistically from broadcast streams, in addition to traditional context data, such as location, temperature, device capabilities, among others. The solutions presented in this paper point to a minimum-effort by the TV user, enabling a more useful, easier and more attractive Integrated TV-Internet viewing experience.