Interactive Digital TV Research Articles

The scientist-innovator, creator and producer. Book review: Itkis, G.E., Krivosheeva, A.M., & Karagesyan, A.K. (Eds.). (2022). M.I. Krivosheev. Strings of fate. Memoirs of the patriarch of television. Moscow: VegaPrint. (In Russ.)

The book, unusual in concept, was published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Soviet and Russian scientist, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor Mark Iosifovich Krivosheev (1922-2018), who made an undeniable contribution to the development of TV broadcasting in the world. His merits and inventions are recognized by both domestic and foreign technical experts and international organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union. The peculiarity of the book is that it is based on the personal notes of the professor, which is of particular value, allowing the reader to understand the point of view of an eyewitness to events at different stages of history. This book is the story of its main author (there are supplementary remarks-explanations in the book) about the difficult path of becoming a TV broadcasting platform and the development of television, which has gone through the stages from infancy to multi-program digital interactive TV broadcasting. It also contains inclusions from the personal life of a scientist, starting from childhood, which focuses attention on the business qualities of a scientist-innovator. The review analyzes the aspects and trends in the development of modern digital television, substantiates character traits that are important for the formation of the personality of a research scientist.

Customer Review on Confidence, Readiness and Security in Electronic Commerce

Nowadays, the world of technologies is evolving. We used to do business within big companies and now, there is e-commerce. The revolution of e-commerce is only just getting started. Over the next few years, e-Commerce is predicted to be widely accessible. E-commerce would have a significant effect on the formation of a truly mass-market phenomenon. It will also have a profound impact on the way trade is done by each person and company. In addition, e-commerce is responsible for implementing digital interactive TV that will bring further e-commerce beyond the realms of PC literacy. The fact that e-commerce is a future way of business really change the landscape of business. The proliferation of e-commerce companies saw the rise of the worldwide number of online companies. Consumers are now opted for business online, which in contrast to conventional transactions is dramatically convenient. E-commerce firms have, in any case, more advantages compared to conventional brick and mortal companies, but the difficulties and problems facing e-commerce businesses cannot be missed. This study illustrated the difficulties and problems of e-commerce and a range of solutions. Trust, readiness and protection are among the problems. Proposed solutions are proposed for each of the problems and challenges. Alibaba Group for example also face this common challenges. Alibaba Group being chosen in this case study as Alibaba was exceptionally skilled in establishing credibility. Despite its revealed vulnerability in intellectual property rights, Alibaba keep on continued give efforts to create credibility and will help to facilitate the evolution of e-commerce platform. Such attempts have made Alibaba is a standard model for e-business but overall, the challenges in this study are collected among all e-commerce platform, not only Alibaba Group.

Providing adjustable and dynamic spatial layouts for multimedia applications with STyLe

Interactive multimedia applications may be presented on multiple devices with different screen sizes. Therefore, application layouts should be adapted during runtime. Besides adapting layouts to different devices, the number of visual multimedia objects may vary, thus it is desirable to provide an automatic application layout adjustment to ease the authoring effort and provide good user quality of experience. In this article, the term adjustable layout is used to refer to an application spatial layout that adjusts itself to the number of media objects to be presented. The term dynamic layout is used to refer to an application spatial layout that can change at runtime in reaction to presentation events. Multimedia declarative authoring languages, such as NCL and SMIL, provide simple layout construction using nested rectangular regions to design the application layout. However, these languages do not provide native facilities for authors to develop adjustable and dynamic layouts. This article proposes STyLe, a constraint-based template language for providing adjustable and dynamic spatial layouts for multimedia documents. It also presents an architecture that is capable of interpreting STyLe when used together with NCL to provide dynamic layouts for interactive digital TV applications. The results show that STyLe has more expressiveness and abstraction when compared to NCL and that the language is simple and effective for building adjustable and dynamic layouts.

Usable and interactive application generator for Digital TV

Interactive Digital TV (iDTV) enhances viewers’ experience and participation by engaging them with an active role. The development of interactive software requires the employment of usability criteria to provide satisfactory experiences for users. In addition, the diverse characteristics of television programs require efficient processes for interactive software development. In Latin America, the process of implementing DTV is in progress, so the current stage of development of interactive applications is too incipient and immature to support industrial, quality-level development. This paper proposes combining software reuse strategies, specifically, software product lines (SPLs) and user-centered interaction design patterns, to improve productivity and quality. A generic feature model for the automatic generation of iDTV applications and an SPL-iDTV tool that supports the model are presented. The proposal is evaluated with two studies: an experiment that attempts to reproduce real application prototypes that were originally developed manually, through the use of patterns, and an evaluation of the quality of the SPL.

Pro-IDTV: A sociotechnical process model for designing IDTV applications

TV is considered a pervasive social medium; with the arrival of digital technology, interactive Digital TV (iDTV) has come into existence, and TV usage has changed. On the one hand, these changes increase TV's potential in terms of its processing capacity, its potential to connect with other devices, and its ability to connect people to broadcasting companies in a two-way trade. On the other hand, these changes also increase the complexity of user interaction, as well as the social and technical challenges for designing solutions. Broadcasting companies may not be prepared to include iDTV application design in their production chain, and there are few theoretical references that can help them. This paper proposes a process model for iDTV named Pro-iDTV: a process for designing iDTV applications grounded on a sociotechnical approach that uses principles of Participatory Design and Organizational Semiotics. This process model was created and applied in a TV company, providing a practical understanding of the real forces that govern the organization, for, in addition, the process has the ability to tailor solutions to fit to this context. This study's results reflect the viability and benefits of the Pro-iDTV for supporting the design of iDTV applications in a practical setting.

Specification and Usability Evaluation of an Attention-aware Remote Control designed in a Physical Prototype

This paper defines requirements for entering text in interactive digital TV, based on theories of shared attention, in order to make a prototype of a remote control which enables more natural user interaction. The physical prototype of this newly created device features movement recognition and sensory feedback as modalities of interaction. In usability tests, data on users’ performance and satisfaction was collected, as well as data on their cognitive load (attention) and state of meditation (relaxation) captured through an Electroencephalogram device. The results showed that the solution, analyzed for a sample of 18 users, increased performance for typing long texts by 26.5%, raised satisfaction scores by 15%, relaxation scores by 29.4%, and maintained the users’ cognitive load when compared to use of an infrared remote control.

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ABSTRACT This article propose the extent of an inspection method called RECOEXTDI (REcorrido COgnitivo EXtendido para aplicaciones de Television Digital Interactiva) to evaluate the usability of applications supported on Interactive Digital Television (IDT) environments. The former method has three basic inputs: The original cognitive walkthrough method, the characteristics of TDI applications, and early testing performed in a TDI laboratory. To assess RECOEXTDI, it is described a case study in which an evaluation of the usability of a TDI application is made, by using the traditional and the extended method. In this way, the results obtained are compared with the implementation of the two methods described. The RECOEXTDI method allowed finding a larger number of usability problems in shorter time, compared with the traditional method. KEYWORDS: Inspection methods, Interactive digital TV (IDT), RECOEXTDI, Usability evaluation.

How to Design and Apply Interactive Digital Educational TV Programs Based on the ADDIE Model

How to Design and Apply Interactive Digital Educational TV Programs Based on the ADDIE Model

Recommendation of Multimedia Content in Digital Convergence Environments: TV and Web

he emerging scenario of interactive Digital TV (iDTV) is promoting the increase of interactivity in the communication process and also in audiovisual production, thus raising the number of channels and resources available to the user. This reality makes the task of finding the desired content becoming a costly and possibly ineffective action. The incorporation of recommender systems in the iDTV environment is emerging as a possible solution to this problem. This work aims to propose a hybrid approach to content recommendation in iDTV, based on data mining techniques, integrated to the Semantic web concepts, allowing structuring and standardization of data and consequently making possible sharing of information, providing semantics and automated reasoning. For the proposed service it is considered the Brazilian Digital TV System (SBTVD) and the middleware Ginga. A prototype has been developed and experiments carried out with NetFlix database. As results, it was obtained an average accuracy of 30% using only the data mining technique. On the other hand, the evaluation including semantic rules obtained an average accuracy of 35%.

An Agent-Based Approach for Delivering Educational Contents Through Interactive Digital TV in the Context of T-Learning

The support of technological resources in teaching and learning has contributed to make them more efficient and enjoyable. Through this support has become quite common to use media resources before explored only for entertainment for educational purposes, among them the TV. The interactive Digital TV (iDTV) provides resources that make possible the development of a plethora of educational applications. However, since TV is a mass distribution device, an aggravating factor in the use of this media for education is the presentation of contents (learning objects) inadequate according to both the users' previous knowledge and the subject of courses in which they are enrolled. This paper tries to fill this gap by proposing an educational environment for iDTV, supported by an adequate standard for classification of learning objects for t-learning, in order to deliver educational contents for iDTV, according to users' knowledge level and suitability of contents to ongoing course.

Domain discovery and expansion in multimedia metadata for digital TV broadcast

The emergence of the Interactive Digital TV iDTV is improving the transmission quality and making available new features and services to the user. With the advent of digital convergence between TV and web platforms, new proposals of semantic organisation of content are being developed, introducing concepts of Semantic Web and knowledge representation that allow semantic description of metadata content through ontologies. This paper proposes a component for finding domains and expansion of multimedia metadata in broadcast DTV based on the Semantic Web concepts and analysis of lexical and semantic similarity, integrated with knowledge TV platform.

Architecture for Integrating Healthcare Services to the Brazilian Digital TV System

As Brazil's interactive Digital TV System (iDTV) is getting impulse, with a strong belief of government and industry that this new system will bring together new economic opportunities, several proposals for extending the potential of TV interactivity to provide innovative services have being proposed nowadays. In this context, the Healthcare is one of the concepts being studied. Healthcare relates to caring about health, preventing diseases, improving the quality o life, and its applications may support hospitals, elderly care centers and similar institutions. Integrating Healthcare technology with home devices is a new trend. Indeed this work aims to investigate new ways for communicating medical devices with the Brazilian iDTV. The solution here proposed is a software platform based on the so called home gateway, which is in charge of interconnecting all medical devices with the iDTV set. As proof of concept two implementation scenarios for measuring the heart beat frequency and the blood pressure were built. All the procedures related to the integration are detailed. We believe this work will be useful in this new field, bringing alternative ways for using common devices and the iDTV to improve the quality of life to the home user.

An Empirical Investigation Into Typing Errors in Interactive Digital Television Applications

Remote controls are especially problematic for writing text, something necessary in many interactive digital TV applications (IDTV). In the context of research aimed at finding effective entry methods for IDTV applications, an empirical investigation was carried out and is presented in this article. The study analyzed the errors committed by 82 users in an experiment in which they wrote 7,395 sentences. Several typing methods suitable for IDTV contexts were used for experimentation. There were 3,562 of the sentences that registered at least one error. These errors were classified and their main causes analyzed, the particular characteristics of the users taken into account. The results show that the most frequent errors are proximity mistakes in all the evaluated methods. They appear in between 13.75% and 32.31% of the sentences, depending on the input method. Also, age and background are major aspects affecting the number and type of mistakes. The results could be the basis of changes in the design of conventional remote controls or in the design of advanced techniques for error recognition and correction.

Multimedia Presentation Integrating Media with Virtual 3D Realistic Environment Produced in Real Time with High Performance Processing

Sophisticated interactive animation may be an interesting element to compose a multimedia document. However, potential demand for high performance computing can make this option impractical in digital interactive TV and mobile device environments, due to computing power restrictions of such platforms, especially when one consider the processing of complex 3D environments with a high degree of realism. In previous work, we proposed a solution to overcome such restrictions based on video streaming. Moving forward, in this paper is presented a solution that is more independent of platform, but still based on the same principle of video streaming. Each module can be specialized in different ways to solve problems related to the computer environment, such as network restrictions and latency on user interaction. Also in this paper is described how to take advantage of media-agnostic feature of some multimedia presentation machines to integrate this type of complex 3D media into multimedia documents. As a proof of concept, we extended and tested an NCL presentation engine to add support to this new type of media.

An Empirical Investigation Into Text Input Methods for Interactive Digital Television Applications

Nowadays there is a huge market emerging in the interactive digital TV realm. In this context, we need new and effective methods of user interaction, as the main interaction device is still the classical remote control. Remote controls are especially problematic when it comes to writing text, something needed in most applications. Thus, we have carried out an empirical investigation to find effective methods of text entry with remote controls. We analyze several methods by performing experiments based on a methodology in which a heterogeneous set of real users carries out several sequential tasks in an incremental process. We analyze entry speeds, error rates, learning profiles, and subjective impressions, taking into account the particular characteristics of the users. Our results show, for instance, that Multitap is a good method for simple texts. It is between 12% and 34% faster than the fastest virtual keyboard, depending on the age of the user. Nevertheless, when complex texts need to be written, virtual keyboards present the same or even better writing speeds (QWERTY is 13% faster) and with significant lower error rates (Multitap is 347% worse than QWERTY). We consider that our results are very interesting for researchers, designers of TV applications, and hardware vendors.

Editorial: ambient media as metaphor for creating new experiences and user interfaces

“Ambient Media” are a fundamentally new way how to define media in the ubiquitous era, and are contribute to the field of human-computer-interaction (HCI), computer science, experience design, media management, and media studies. Ambient Media have been defined, explored, and conceptualized in [2–5, 10]. This special issue devotes to the exploration of phenomena of ambient media, in particular on aspects of search and retrieval, interactive interfaces, designing experiences, applying new interaction concepts, the design of experiences, educational issues, and the future prospective of this novel media form. For this special issue, we accepted six papers exploring these issues. A very special feature of this special issue is, that the contributing authors collaboratively worked on the analysis of the containing articles. This article shall give a holistic overview of the current status of Ambient Media, and outlines its potential future till 2020. The paper contributed by A. Scherp contributes with the aspect of search of open social media data via mobile phones. Interactive user interfaces are explored by M. Golja in his work, and particularly addresses the design of interfaces for digital interactive TV and their limitations. New learning strategies, and especially how libraries transform from their analogue to their digital counterpart has been explored by M. Bilandzic. Experience as a phenomena in social living contexts as e.g. at home, has been explored by D. Obal, who devoted his research to the Multimed Tools Appl (2014) 71:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s11042-014-1899-0

Information Extraction in Semantic, Highly-Structured, and Semi-Structured Web Sources

The evolution of the Web from the original proposal made in 1989 can be considered one of the most revolutionary technological changes in centuries. During the past 25 years the Web has evolved from a static version to a fully dynamic and interoperable intelligent ecosystem. The amount of data produced during these few decades is enormous. New applications, developed by individual developers or small companies, can take advantage of both services and data already present on the Web. Data, produced by humans and machines, may be available in different formats and through different access interfaces. This paper analyses three different types of data available on the Web and presents mechanisms for accessing and extracting this information. The authors show several applications that leverage extracted information in two areas of research: recommendations of educational resources beyond content and interactive digital TV applications.

Hybrid compilation and optimization for java-based digital TV platforms

The Java-based software platform for interactive digital TV (DTV) is composed of the system/middleware class statically installed on the DTV set-top box and the xlet applications dynamically downloaded from the TV stations. The xlet application includes Java classes and image/text files. The xlets are executed only when the TV viewer initiates an interaction, even if the xlets have been completely downloaded. To achieve high performance on this dual-component, user-initiated system, existing just-in-time (JIT) compilation and optimization is not enough; instead, ahead-of-time and idle-time compilation and optimization are also needed, requiring a hybrid compilation and optimization environment. We constructed such a hybrid environment for a commercial DTV software platform and evaluated it using real, on-air xlet applications. Our experimental results show that the proposed hybrid environment can improve the DTV Java performance by more than three times, compared to the JIT-only environment, with little change to other DTV behavior.

Smart marketing in Brazilian digital TV system through a recommendation ads

With the implementation of the Brazilian Digital TV System (SBTVD), starts a range of new opportunities and possibilities both for viewer as for TV stations. For the viewers, they will have an immense amount of channels, programs and interactive advertisements. For TV stations, it increases the possibility of advertising in new media. Within this framework, the opportunity arises for a recommendation system for applications and interactivity portals. This dissertation presents a proposal of advertising personalization into applications and portals of digital TV environment in order to bring a better experience to the viewer, a new form of income for the broadcasters and also a greater acceptance of specialized products for use. This work develops an application for interactive Digital TV called Smart Marketing, capable of capturing viewer navigation data through both implicit and explicit means by performing customized advertising from the process of knowledge discovery. Developed from AstroTV middleware, compatible with the Brazilian specification, its application was evaluated by means of experiment that used varied user profiles, applying into the generated database the process of knowledge discovery, which used tasks of classification and grouping. The results indicated the quality of the recommendation generated by Smart Marketing.

Digital TV: structures of feeling in the television of becoming

The objective of this text is to present some reflections on theinsertion of a new model of television in Brazil (interactive digital TV),adopting the concept of culture as the center to think of the television system.The notion for structure of feeling, by Raymond Williams, opens up atype of new window that helps to understand this new television whichis being implanted.