Electronic Programme Guides Research Articles

Audio rendering smart TV apps through mobile devices

TV service providers now offer a variety of features, including broadcast-related ones like electronic programme guides, catch-up and recording features, but also Internet access and a variety of TV applications. These new features turn TV devices into more versatile and interesting platforms, but also clog the screen with more content than ever. Since this content is mainly visual, this means that TVs have even more inaccessible content for visually impaired people. This paper presents the design of a solution that audio renders the TV application’s user interface through a mobile device. Resorting to a mix of accessibility experts and user studies, we compared multiple feedback versions containing different contextual information. Participants reported that the use of repetitive sentences should be avoided; concise feedback feels smoother and quicker but, for some, lacks information while extended feedback can be annoying and take too much time though is appropriate for learning phases. For menus, most participants suggested to include the position of an element and the number of elements. The results helped to identify the critical information to convey to the user and to tailor two modes differing in the amount of contextual information provided, suitable for differently skilled users. Additionally, we condensed the findings into a list of design guidelines which can be generalized to other auditory interfaces meant to be operated by a VI user.

A multi-agent brokerage platform for media content recommendation

Abstract Near real time media content personalisation is nowadays a major challenge involving media content sources, distributors and viewers. This paper describes an approach to seamless recommendation, negotiation and transaction of personalised media content. It adopts an integrated view of the problem by proposing, on the business-to-business (B2B) side, a brokerage platform to negotiate the media items on behalf of the media content distributors and sources, providing viewers, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, with a personalised electronic programme guide (EPG) containing the set of recommended items after negotiation. In this setup, when a viewer connects, the distributor looks up and invites sources to negotiate the contents of the viewer personal EPG. The proposed multi-agent brokerage platform is structured in four layers, modelling the registration, service agreement, partner lookup, invitation as well as item recommendation, negotiation and transaction stages of the B2B processes. The recommendation service is a rule-based switch hybrid filter, including six collaborative and two content-based filters. The rule-based system selects, at runtime, the filter(s) to apply as well as the final set of recommendations to present. The filter selection is based on the data available, ranging from the history of items watched to the ratings and/or tags assigned to the items by the viewer. Additionally, this module implements (i) a novel item stereotype to represent newly arrived items, (ii) a standard user stereotype for new users, (iii) a novel passive user tag cloud stereotype for socially passive users, and (iv) a new content-based filter named the collinearity and proximity similarity (CPS). At the end of the paper, we present off-line results and a case study describing how the recommendation service works. The proposed system provides, to our knowledge, an excellent holistic solution to the problem of recommending multimedia contents.

Challenges and opportunities of iDTV for audience measurement systems: a set-top box-based approach

Advanced innovations such as digital transmission technologies and personal video-recorders (PVRs) have changed TV viewing behaviour. In order to maintain their position as the world's largest advertising channel, television broadcasters are increasingly dependent on accurate and in-depth audience data. Unfortunately, the traditional measurement techniques fail to keep up with innovations of interactive digital TV (iDTV) such as video-on-demand (VOD), time shifted viewing, an electronic programme guide (EPG), ad avoidance using the PVR, etc. This article reflects on the current state of audience measurement in Europe and describes our search to tackle some of the challenges. Contrary to traditional systems that use dedicated and expensive hardware, this article presents a set-top box-only approach.

Copyright in compilations, investing in information: Electronic Programme Guides

Copyright in compilations, investing in information: Electronic Programme Guides

Semantic-based framework for personalised ambient media

The paper proposes a semantic-based metadata framework for personalised interaction with TV media in a connected home context. Our approach allows the current home media centres to go beyond the simple concept of electronic programme guides and to offer the users a personalised media experience in an ambient home environment. The user’s characteristics, preferences and context are used to personalise the user’s experience of viewing and interacting with multimedia content on different heterogeneous devices. The TV-Anytime specification provides the basis for the metadata framework for handling content from IP, digital broadcast, and Blu-ray disc sources.

Networked Multimedia with Internet Media Guides

Internet Media Guides (IMGs) are a generalisation of Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) as known from digital video broadcasting (DVB). They are independent of specific metadata formats and thus are able to support a broad range of applications, including EPG distribution for TV networks and distribution of session descriptions for Internet-based multimedia sessions. Unlike most existing approaches, the IMG framework is also completely independent of specific delivery networks for the media content described in media guides—and it is also independent of the distribution mechanisms for the media guides themselves: IMGs can be distributed in unidirectional broadcast networks, they can also retrieved over established query/response protocols such as HTTP, and they allow for asynchronous change-notifications to interested subscribers. This paper presents the fundamental concepts of the IMG framework and introduces the main components. We further describe implementation and application experiences and discuss potential enhancements to the existing IMG specifications.

Improving the Quality of the Personalized Electronic Program Guide

As Digital TV subscribers are offered more and more channels, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to locate the right programme information at the right time. The personalized Electronic Programme Guide (pEPG) is one solution to this problem; it leverages artificial intelligence and user profiling techniques to learn about the viewing preferences of individual users in order to compile personalized viewing guides that fit their individual preferences. Very often the limited availability of profiling information is a key limiting factor in such personalized recommender systems. For example, it is well known that collaborative filtering approaches suffer significantly from the sparsity problem, which exists because the expected item-overlap between profiles is usually very low. In this article we address the sparsity problem in the Digital TV domain. We propose the use of data mining techniques as a way of supplementing meagre ratings-based profile knowledge with additional item-similarity knowledge that can be automatically discovered by mining user profiles. We argue that this new similarity knowledge can significantly enhance the performance of a recommender system in even the sparsest of profile spaces. Moreover, we provide an extensive evaluation of our approach using two large-scale, state-of-the-art online systems--PTVPlus, a personalized TV listings portal and Fischlar, an online digital video library system.

Human factors in the design of a personalizable EPG: Preference-indication strategies, habit watching and trust

The article describes a user study to support the design of a personalizable EPG (Electronic TV Programme Guide), and of its user interface for editing user preference profiles regarding TV channels and categories. This study focuses on issues related to users' behaviour and perceptions regarding a personalizable EPG, and especially regarding the personalization process. Users were presented with a paper-and-pencil procedure to indicate their TV viewing preferences, as well as with an electronic version. Their strategies were observed and their opinions asked, especially on trusting a system that uses this data. Moreover, their viewing behaviour was monitored over a period of two weeks, and recommendations for the second week were based on the viewing behaviour of the first week. The results indicate that users are reasonably comfortable and consistent in describing their viewing habits in terms of preferences, both for the paper-and-pencil and electronic preference-indication procedures, but that fine tuning this profile on the basis of habit watching would considerably improve the efficacy of the recommendations. It was found that subjects trust the system with the task of preselecting their TV programmes on the basis of their preference indications, although they are not sure whether a habit-watching system would be capable of following their changing habits over time.

Pressing the red button: Consumers and digital television

The government intends to switch over all UK television transmissions from analogue to digital by 2010. But where do consumers stand on digital? Currently less than 60 per cent of the population claims to be aware of the plan for switchover. The key driver of take‐up for viewers who have already made the change is the desire for multichannel television rather than for digital per se. Between one‐tenth and one‐fifth of the population say they will never go digital. A key tool for digital television viewers is the electronic programme guide (EPG), which enables them to navigate around the many channels available and access interactive services. Concerns about the power of EPG operators to control the way in which programme information is made available to viewers led the commercial television regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), to commission research into how EPGs influence viewing. This found that over a third of digital viewers (38 per cent) often used the EPG to decide what to watch. But respondents were not always aware from the EPG which channels were new: over three‐quarters (77 per cent) were interested in having them placed in their own section on the EPG or otherwise highlighted. A much‐quoted feature of digital television is interactivity, but this has not been a main driver of take‐up. Text and games appear the most popular interactive features. In the digital future, public service channels must be given due prominence on EPGs. However, digital technology may spell major changes for public service broadcasting. And it is still not clear how fully many viewers have grasped the implications of the digital television age. The chapter explores the notion that the very nature of channels may change as devices such as personal video recorders enable viewers to assemble their own programme schedules from the wide range of services available.

The virtual interactive presenter: a conversational character for interactive television

This paper describes the development of a conversational interface for interactive TV. With the advent of multi-channel digital TV, accessing Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) will become increasingly complex. We claim that a conversational interface can support incremental refinement of user selections, thus assisting user choice without requiring extensive knowledge of the editorial categories used in the EPG. We present the system architecture and describe the building blocks of this system in terms of underlying technologies, namely speech recognition, Natural Language Processing, dialogue modelling, character animation and multi-modal presentation. The use of an animated character appears to influence the implementation of each of these basic techniques. After giving an overview of the system behaviour and architecture, we describe the various building blocks of a conversational agent as implemented in our system and to what extent each of the underlying technologies are influenced by the use of a conversational character. We report current results by describing example dialogues from the system. Finally, we compare our approach with other interface agents' paradigms.

Electronic programme guides and service information

Some basic concepts about electronic programme guides and what Philips is doing in the area are explained, followed by a more detailed explanation of some key components needed in such a system. By way of example, some aspects of the Philips system are highlighted, both on the receiver and the transmitter side. Special attention is given to the constraining character of the digital video broadcast environment; some challenging problems for the design of an electronic programme guide in such environments are explained, and solutions are sketched.