Personal Video Research Articles

Method for providing live content during playback of recorded streams in personal video recorders

Personal video recorders provide the facility of recording live broadcast streams thus users can replay their recordings whenever they want. However, during playback of those recorded streams, users are isolated from the live content (e.g., latest news) in which they might be interested. In this paper, we propose an MPEG-2 transport stream compatible method which can inform the user about live content that's in user interest area during playback. The method-specific structures, algorithms and an implementation on a Linux platform are presented in the paper

Modeling and analysis for optimal PVR implementation

This paper presents a new methodology of modeling and analyzing required elements to design an HD-DTV PVR (high definition digital television personal video recorder) with efficient architecture. The bits modeling method is based on the RMS (rate monotonic scheduling) algorithm and provides a convenient way to predict the performance of real-time PVR systems and to modify its architecture with optimal resources. From the analysis, we could design PVR whose real-time performance is verified. We also developed time-shifter ASIC chip that is in charge of manipulating HD streams to support various functions like trick-mode play in the PVR

Effectiveness of Telescopic Advertisements Delivered via Personal Video Recorders

<h3>ABSTRACT</h3> The advent of personal video recorders (PVRs) may alter existing patterns of television advertising viewing. Although much of this might be characterized by increased advertising avoidance, this article explores the potential for a new advertising model utilizing PVRs, “telescopic advertising,” enabling viewers to access extended content associated with the advertising. The effectiveness of four telescopic advertisements is compared with advertisements for the same products using the traditional 30-second TV commercial format and the infomercial format. Across four product categories, using an Australian sample, telescopic advertisements achieved significantly higher attitude toward the advertisement, attitude toward the brand, and behavioral intentions.

Design of HD-quality Streaming Networks for Real-time Content Distribution

Recent advances in storage and networking technology are rapidly changing users' TY viewing patterns. Personal video recorders (PVRs) enable people to watch what they want when they want by recording TV programs into local disks. In addition, PVRs can easily share TV contents over peer-to-peer networks once they are equipped with broadband connections. However, the current broadband bandwidth makes it difficult to support HD-quality TV content streaming on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a novel HD-quality streaming architecture for real-time broadcast content distribution. We develop two efficient scheduling schemes, matching a communication pair and switching/replication for system load-balancing, to further utilize network and disk bandwidth. We also evaluate buffer requirement to continue storing time-shifted programs without missing any broadcast data. By extensive simulation experiments, we show the effect of our proposed schemes and time-shifting policy.

Targeted Advertising Strategies on Television

The personal video recorder (PVR) facilitates the use of targeted advertising by allowing companies to monitor television viewing behavior and to build demographic profiles of viewers from the data that are collected. Our research explores the extent to which an advertiser should allocate resources to increase the quality of its targeting. We present a game-theoretic model that extends the conventional measurement of targeting quality by exploring the trade-off between two measures: accuracy and recognition. Accuracy measures the likelihood that any target segment prediction is correct, while recognition conversely measures the likelihood that any member of the target segment is identified. We find that the relative resources allocated to improving accuracy and recognition depend upon the size of the population of viewers, the propensity of viewers to skip commercials, the overall cost of airing commercials, and the competitive environment. Furthermore, the incentives to improve accuracy are markedly different from those to improve recognition. Although improving accuracy does not affect the extent of price competition, improving recognition leads to intensified price competition and reduced profitability in the product market. Thus, when facing a competitor that pursues a strategy to improve its recognition of potential customers, an advertiser should choose to reduce its investment in recognition and increase its investment in accuracy.

Learning and teaching

Learning and teaching

Meaningful scene filtering for tv terminals

Nowadays, the progression of digital broadcasting has been toward establishing a user-friendly TV watching environment through personalized broadcasting services. In the consumer domain, video content filtering enables personalized broadcasting service in which a TV viewer obtains desired scenes even from live broadcasts, which cannot possess metadata. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new real-time content filtering system for live broadcasts that can be applied to TV terminals such as the set-top box and personal video recorder. Based on the proposed filtering, the TV viewer can watch not only favorite broadcasts of a main channel, but also get desired scenes from live broadcasts of other channels simultaneously. The usefulness of the proposed broadcasting content filtering is verified with sport videos on a test-bed broadcasting system.

An enhanced video summarization system using audio features for a personal video recorder

We extend our sports video browsing framework for personal video recorders, such as DVD recorders, blu-ray disc recorders and/or hard disc recorders, to other genres. We reduce the computational complexity by reducing the number of audio classes to a small but useful set that is useful for both sports video and music video, as well as by reducing the complexity of the Gaussian mixture models. Our extension to music video content consists of detecting music/song periods by compensating for false alarms. Our results indicate that our enhanced audio-only summarization maintains the sports video performance and works well with music video content. We can therefore integrate the enhancement into our product while in fact reducing the computational complexity.

Co-producing Video Diaries: The Presence of the “Absent” Researcher

Video diaries are said to provide a more “direct” understanding of participants' experiences than is afforded by data that are “controlled” by the researcher. In this article, the author problematizes this viewpoint and argues that personal video accounts are socially located constructions that are produced in response to a specific research context. Using examples from research that examines identity with young men who have severe physical impairments, she illustrates these effects and the role of the researcher in co-producing video accounts. Rather than viewing this as problematic, she suggests that examining how participants construct their video accounts as situated research participants provides a valuable source of analyzable data. The author outlines a method for interrogating video accounts that builds on these foundational assumptions.

An integrated network/storage architecture for sharing high-quality broadcast TV contents

With the advent of personal video recorders (PVRs), the way people watch TV is rapidly changing. By recording or time-shifting live TV programs into the embedded-disk storage of a PVR, people can watch what they want independent of the broadcasting schedule. Furthermore, peer-to-peer networking technology provides an additional TV content distribution channel to unidirectional broadcasting. However, due to the current limited broadband bandwidth, it is difficult to support high-quality TV content streaming between PVRs on the Internet. In this article we propose novel integrated network/storage architecture to provide the streaming of high-quality broadcast TV contents over fast network connections. To take full advantage of our system resources, we also develop efficient sharing schemes such as matching of a communication pair and channel assignment for extensive time-shifting.

A highlight scene detection and video summarization system using audio feature for a personal video recorder

The personal video recorder such as recordable-DVD recorder, Blu-ray disc recorder and/or hard disc recorder has become popular for a large volume storage device for video/audio content data and a browsing function that would quickly provide a desired scene to the user is required as an essential part of such a large capacity recording/playback system. We propose a highlight scene detection function by using only 'audio' features and realize a browsing function for the recorder that enables completely automatic detection of sports highlights. We detect sports highlights by identifying portions with "commentator's excited speech" using Gaussian mixture models (GMM's) trained using the MDL criterion. Our computation is carried out directly on the MDCT coefficients from the AC-3 coefficients thus giving us a tremendous speed advantage. Our accuracy of detection of sports highlights is high across a variety of sports.

Will hard drives finally stop shrinking?

There have been explosive growth in the sales of small digital consumer electronic devices such as still and video cameras, TiVo personal video recorders (PVRs), and MP3 players like Apple Computer's iPod. As these devices have gained capabilities, they have needed larger storage capacities in smaller packages, often in the form of hard drives. For handheld and consumer electronic devices, the increasingly popular minidrives are generally up to 1.8 inches in diameter with storage capacity of up to 60 Gbytes. However, vendors have been releasing drives just 1 inch in diameter, and some, such as Toshiba, have announced drives as small as 0.85 inches in diameter. Various experts say the technology for shrinking disk technology has reached its limit and that there is little demand or market pressure for smaller drives. If vendors can't reduce drive size, companies that want to shrink their devices further may have to turn to flash memory or other types of smaller storage. This potential for losing business has forced drive vendors to look for ways to adjust.

Fernsehen im Zeitalter von Networked Personal Video Recordern

A personal video recorder (PVR) is a video recorder with a hard drive or a PC with an integrated TV tuner card. Instead of recording the movies on an analogue tape, they record content digitally on the PVR’s hard drive. PVRs can be connected to the Internet, allowing users to (illegally) massively distribute recorded content online using for example peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA. The PVR technology enables new services, which influence the traditional business models of broadcasters (free and pay TV). On the one hand shows containing commercials are recorded and stored digitally on a user’s hard drive, which allows easy skipping of ads. Some PVRs even automatically skip ads while playing the recording. On the other hand pay TV content is widely available for free on illegal channels like KaZaA reducing the uniqueness of pay TV offerings. This article discusses the risks arising with increasing diffusion of PVRs. Depending on the chosen formats the risks for the business models of free and pay TV stations are presented. The article finally provides strategic implications for TV stations facing the competition of PVRs.

Episode detection in videos captured using a head-mounted camera

With the advent of wearable computing, personal imaging, photojournalism and personal video diaries, the need for automated archiving of the videos captured by them has become quite pressing. The principal device used to capture the human-environment interaction with these devices is a wearable camera (usually a head-mounted camera). The videos obtained from such a camera are raw and unedited versions of the visual interaction of the wearer (the user of the camera) with the surroundings. The focus of our research is to develop post-processing techniques that can automatically abstract videos based on episode detection. An episode is defined as a part of the video that was captured when the user was interested in an external event and paid attention to record it. Our research is based on the assumption that head movements have distinguishable patterns during an episode occurrence and these patterns can be exploited to differentiate between an episode and a non-episode. Here we present a novel algorithm exploiting the head and body behaviour for detecting the episodes. The algorithm’s performance is measured by comparing the ground truth (user-declared episodes) with the detected episodes. The experiments show the high degree of success we achieved with our proposed method on several hours of head-mounted video captured in varying locations.

Automatic video summarizing tool using MPEG-7 descriptors for personal video recorder

We introduce an automatic video summarizing tool (AVST) for a personal video recorder. The tool utilizes MPEG-7 visual descriptors to generate a video index for a summary. The resulting index generates not only a preview of a movie but also allows non-linear access with thumbnails. In addition, the index supports the searching of shots similar to a desired one within saved video sequences. Moreover, simple shot-based video editing can readily be achieved using the generated index.

Fast scene change detection for personal video recorder

We propose an efficient scene change detection method for personal video recorder to provide users with several convenient functionalities such as the browsing, fast forward and skip-play of recorded videos. Since most of the current available PVRs have low-powered CPUs, the scene change detector should not be computationally expensive. We implement the scene change detection algorithm using reduced images of only intra pictures in MPEG-2 compressed domain. The experimental results with a commercial PVR demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

P‐125: Personal Projection, or How to Put a Large Screen in a Small Device

AbstractWe introduce the technology and applications of personal projectors, small and inexpensive video projection devices intended for use in battery‐powered handheld or wearable products. We explore the engineering and perceptual suitability of arrays of surface‐emitting lasers for this application, and discuss a prototype constructed in our research group.

The Digital Future of Terrestrial Advertiser-supported Television 1

The digital transmission of signals greatly increases the channel carrying capacity of the broadcast spectrum and provides scope for a substantial increase in the number of television channels transmitted terrestrially in each broadcasting market. A simple model of a hypothetical advertiser-supported television market shows that with increased channel numbers the average audience size for programmes and channels will decline, advertising revenue per channel will decline, programme costs per audience member will increase, and average profit per channel will decline. In practice, with digital terrestrial television the number of new channels licensed will continue to be subject to government regulatory decisions. But even with liberalisation of licensing policy, the economics of advertiser-supported television broadcasting will impose severe limitations on the number of new channels that any market can support. Digital interactive television services offer commercial broadcasters the prospect of a new source of revenue. The financial viability of these services, however, is not yet proven. Another unknown factor is the impact that personal video recorders will have on television advertising revenues. The transition from analogue to digital terrestrial transmission will have wide-ranging effects on commercial television viewing, but probably not on the structure and ownership of the television broadcasting industry.

Introducing Ratings in Transition

There is considerable ferment surrounding audience measurement systems in Australia and internationally (Balnaves, O'Regan and Sternberg, 2002). This article identifies the range and sources of this ferment. It pinpoints several pressure points such as the constitution of ratings panels and the problems of survey fatigue in a fragmenting media environment. Consideration is also given to ‘next generation’ ratings measurement technologies such as the personal people meter (PPM) and their likely impact upon the industry and its norms, and new media formats such as the personal video recorder (PVR) and the problems and opportunities they create for audience measurement systems.

The largest players rule the media playground

The top media companies increasingly do a lot more than create content. The 12 companies outlined in this article deliver content via cable systems and the Internet. They also have investments in makers of personal video recorders (PVRs) and set-top boxes and suppliers of video on demand. Consider the former Moxi Digital, builder of a personal entertainment hub that can play DVDs and CDs and can function as a PVR and a set-top box. Moxi's investors, before Vulcan purchased it, included AOL Time Warner, Vulcan, and Scientific-Atlanta. Vulcan also owns Digeo, another hub maker, with which Moxi was merged. Eight of the companies listed-AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, GE, Liberty Media, Sony, Viacom, and Vulcan-were investors in ReplayTV before it was bought by SonicBlue. TiVo, an up-and-coming PVR maker, has attracted hefty investments from almost all major media companies. The most-connected company is AOL Time Warner. Under its umbrella one of its several movie or TV studios can create a film that gets shown on its HBO channel via the Time Warner cable system. Only US business interests are shown here. Many have overseas media holdings, notably France's Vivendi Universal, Japan's Sony, and News Corp. in Australia.