Television Platform Research Articles

The short future of public broadcasting: Replacing digital terrestrial television with internet protocol?

According to recent European estimates, the life expectancy of broadcasting as a free-to-air television platform is not more than 15 years. BBC, Yle and the UK regulator Ofcom have reached this conclusion in their reports about the future of news, media distribution and digital terrestrial television. Although broadcasting is seen as necessary until 2030, all three assume that digital terrestrial television can – under certain conditions – be replaced with delivery using internet protocol. However, it seems that the idea of IPTV taking over digital terrestrial television is just a sophisticated version of ‘black box fallacy’, driven by the expected growth of the new media ecosystem. The problems in replacing a socio-technological system have largely been neglected.

Statistical illusion of welfare (what’s wrong with the definition of poverty in Russia?)

A real threshold and depth of poverty in Russia are determined in the work. The necessity of creating a television platform to discuss and identify the adequate evaluation of the welfare of the population is emphasized.

An IP-TV P2P streaming system that improves the viewing quality and confines the startup delay of regular audience

This paper investigates how a p2p television platform can take advantage of the presence of frequent channel viewers to grant them a more satisfying service than to less regular spectators, and how such privileged users can also be protected when unfavorable operating conditions manifest within the overlay. The explored idea is to learn beforehand about the users’ interests, monitoring their behavior in the recent past, in order to cluster them in groups that display different habits; then, the video chunk scheduling algorithm of the overlay is altered, with the aim of serving frequent spectators in a privileged manner, providing them with a better viewing experience and a faster access to the selected channel without overly penalizing less habitual customers. An analytical model is developed, to capture the difference in average startup delay that the proposed modifications introduce; several additional performance metrics are numerically determined, in order to thoroughly size up the performance of both groups of viewers. The obtained results show that a clear service differentiation is attained and demonstrate that, if bandwidth resources become scarce, frequent viewers are protected and still enjoy a broadcasting service of superior quality.

Film4, Freeview and Public Service Broadcasting: Screening Films on British Television in the Multi-channel Era

This article analyses the shift in programming policy that took place when Channel 4's specialist subscription channel FilmFour was relaunched as Film4 on the Freeview digital terrestrial television platform in 2006. Adopting a similar survey approach to Hannah Andrews (2012), this article examines new data sources tracking patterns in programming and scheduling practices in order to interrogate the nationality, age and genre of films screened on both channels between 1998 and 2011. The changing character of film programming during this period is shown to relate, in part, to increased commercial pressures brought about by the rapidly evolving multi-channel landscape. But while commercial imperatives were indeed a key factor in this evolution, Film4's scheduling strategies are also shown to be a product of the broadcaster's desire to reassert its public service identity in the Freeview era. Bibliographical addition: Andrews, H. (2012), ‘Public Service Broadcasters and British Cinema, 1990–2010’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick.

From digital switchover to austerity measures: A case study of the Cypriot television landscape

Abstract In April 2013 Cyprus and the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) reached an agreement aimed at addressing the country’s financial imbalances by leading the Island through a series of austerity measures. This article addresses the Cypriot digital television landscape three years following digital switchover (DSO) and currently in the midst of austerity measures. The article draws on long-term historical analyses combined with discourse analysis of current policy decisions, media coverage and expert interviews with the main stakeholders. It is divided into five sections. The first situates the case study within an appropriate theoretical framework. The second sheds light on Cyprus’ turbulent history and how it has affected the development of the media sectors. Next, it offers an overview of digital television in Cyprus and highlights how the main players had positioned themselves in the market before the country sunk into a deep recession. The fourth section underlines the financial crisis and the resulting austerity measures that have affected Cyprus, especially since 2012/2013. In the fifth and final section, the work focuses on the current situation, paying particular attention to how political and market-driven agendas have collided, with the example of the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform Velister.

Unintended Consequences: Satellite Policy and Indigenous Television

This article examines two instances of media policy involving satellite transmission and Indigenous television: the introduction of the Viewer Access Satellite Television (VAST) platform in 2010 and the introduction of AUSSAT in the mid-1980s. The government's failure to provide community and Indigenous broadcasters with an access regime at the time of AUSSAT resulted in Australia's first and only Indigenous commercial television licensee, Imparja. Over a quarter of a century later, Imparja now forms part of the joint-venture company that runs VAST, a key component of Australia's digital switchover planning. During the passage of the legislative amendments required to establish VAST, the issue of access resurfaced – this time in relation to Australia's national and community Indigenous television channels. The article recounts the events leading up to the 2010 Bill, and examines the intended and unintended consequences of satellite policy in relation to Indigenous media, including equalisation and transparency of government funding programs.

A virtual touch event method using scene recognition for digital television

Because of rich applications, smart operating systems on cell phones are now being migrated to home appliances like televisions. However, applications that are originally designed to be operated by touch screen are not suitable for televisions with these systems. This paper presents a method to manipulate applications with infrared remote control instead of touch screen on televisions without rewriting the code of these applications or adding extra expense on hardware. The principle of the method is to map keystroke events on the remote control to virtual touch-based events according to specific mapping relationship corresponding to each application. Since the mapping relationship is various in each scene within one application, scenes should be recognized with feature information before the mapping process. The feature information and the mapping relationship in each scene have been set up prior to running of the application. When one application is running, the current scene of the application could be identified by scene recognition algorithm, the mapping relationship related to the current scene is able to be acquired, and then keystrokes on the remote control would be mapped to touch-based events. The proposed method is tested on a smart television platform, and the result indicates the method can operate most applications by remote control, while the input response delay brought by the event mapping is negligibly less than one millisecond.

Personally customizable content authoring service for Internet Protocol television subscribers

SUMMARYIn this paper, we propose a personally customizable content authoring service (C2Channel) using an Internet Protocol television (IPTV) platform, in which a user terminal such as a PC or set‐top box sends various kinds of multimedia files from a camera or camcorder to a remotely located authoring server (C2Channel server). The C2Channel server creates personalized content in real time by combining special effects with the multimedia files transmitted from the user terminal and then retransmits them to a predefined relevant service group as a personal IPTV channel through an IPTV network provider. This content authoring service supplies an automatic multimedia editing/composition service and offers unicast, multicast, and groupcast services for a large number of interested groups via an IPTV‐based real‐time media delivery platform (Open Live IPTV Engine [OLIVE]), in which a service management server is used for user identification through the IPTV personal channel. Because this platform uses a remote server resource when authoring personally customizable content, resources remaining at the user's terminal can be variously utilized. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The future organization of the United Kingdom’s DTT platform

This article looks at the complex set of relationships between the main participants in the United Kingdom’s digital terrestrial television platform, gives a brief account of how they evolved, and summarizes many of the concerns now being expressed inside the industry about the future of its organization.

GLOBAL STRATEGIES IN THE CHILDREN'S MEDIA MARKET

Children represent a very lucrative and sought‐after target for many consumer products globally, and interest in media entertainment programming catering to this specific audience has risen accordingly. Through the case study of Jetix, a transnational channel operating in the Italian media landscape on the satellite television platform Sky Italia, the article explores the strategies of global media and entertainment conglomerates competing to reach young consumers worldwide. The article analyzes Jetix's business model and strategies in the local market to establish and maintain a competitive advantage through its programming and its brands while leveraging its global production, distribution, and marketing structures. Jetix's evolving strategies are also analyzed in light of its global change of ownership from News Corporation to Disney.

Delivery of a Certified E-mail Service over the Digital Terrestrial Television Platform

At present, the electronic mail service is probably the most widespread and commonly used asynchronous way ofexchanging information among people, thanks to its immediacy and easiness of use. Information delivered through E-mail can be sensitive or confidential: ensuring the sender’s identity and providing privacy has become a vital step in stopping spam, fraud and even more serious crimes. To this aim, public entities have adopted Certified E-mail systems to manage secure interactions with citizens.Digital Terrestrial Television introduced new facilities in thetraditional broadcasting environment, and determined the transition of several Electronic based-services to Television basedservices. The availability of commercial Set Top Boxes equipped with network interfaces and smart card readers enables the provisioning of personalized interactive TV services, requiring user’s identification and authentication, that still represent open issues in the TV context. In this paper we discuss the challenges of a Certified E-mail service over Digital Terrestrial Television,and present the case study of the Italian Regione Marche, in which this service is under development to support the remote request of certificates issued by the public administration. In particular, our attention is devoted to user authentication and secure access to the administrative services, addressed through the use of a Regional Service Card, an interactive application, and a centralized authentication framework.

Access Pricing to a Digital Broadcasting Platform

This article studies a television market where operators can sell access to programs and to advertising time. First, we determine the retail prices paid by viewers and advertisers to a monopoly platform when there are externalities between these two markets. We compare the prices that an unregulated platform would establish with the welfare maximizing prices. Second, we obtain the access charge that an independent programmer should pay to a television platform for using one of his channels. We show that the optimal access charge takes into account the direct cost of access and the platform's opportunity costs in the viewer and advertiser markets, which are affected by the externalities between the two markets.

A word from the editor

A word from the editor