Page 53 - AIB | The Chanel | Issue 1 2012
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THE CHANNEL
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ISSUE 1 2012
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53
CONTENT
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THE CHANNEL
discover and share their content,
gamify the TV experience, and
engage in new ways…. but also the
simple fact is itʹs bi‐directional. Like
the web it can and will give Internet
Protocol (IP) metrics that the old
school TV value chain could only
dream about in the past — giving a
deeper understanding of
consumers and their behaviour.
Let me give you some example
headlines that make my case:
• 2011: 70% of tablet owners are
using their device & 50 % of
people are regularly online whilst
watching TV ‐
• 2011: 57% of over‐16s in the UK
are using the internet for social
networking ‐
• 2011: 60% of TV viewers are
distracted by a smartphone while
watching TV ‐
• 2011: 82% of TV adverts generate
negative ROI ‐
Is there life after the 30‐Second
Spot? Yes, and temporally‐tagged
TV metadata is the key.
Why? Think about it. When
Angelina Jolie shows up for the
premiere of Kung Fu Panda 2
wearing Michael Kors ‐ and that
dress has been tagged as metadata
in the timeline of the show — the
tag can then become a trigger for an
action on the second screen. Such
as, ʹSave for Later and Buyʹ or
ʹLearn Moreʹ. When a Porsche
shows up in a movie scene —
perhaps it can trigger a second
screen call to action by offering a
free test drive? Perhaps even a
different model can be shown
depending on whether more is
known about the demographic of
the user — throwing in more
targeted advertising to boot.
Now this all sounds great and
even perhaps easy. But itʹs not. And
thatʹs why itʹs the new oil. The lack
of standardisation in the area of TV
programme information (or TV
"metadata" as it is called) poses
increasing problems right through
the TV value chain. Everybody
loses, from content producers,
broadcasters, advertisers and
network operators to viewers.
Production companies are
chock‐full of creatives — they donʹt
find this extra work appealing in
any sense and are not doing it.
Thereʹs another chance to create
contextual temporal tags at the
broadcaster level — as they buy the
scripts. But the infrastructure and
common standards are just not
there yet in the playout systems. So
in many cases, itʹs third parties that
are trying to solve this problem
outside of the old school.
TWOWAYS TO TAG
There are essentially two ways to
tag video entertainment: curated
and automated. And both have
their pros and cons. Manually
tagging millions of programmes
and shows is going to take a decade
of Mechanical Turks but this really
offers up the best metadata.
On the other hand, there are
companies that use technologies to
automate the process such as Speech
to Text, Video Recognition tech‐
nologies, Audio Fingerprinting,
Natural Language Processing
techniques, and when available,
Closed Caption data to create
temporal tagging of content to provide
a clear view of what is happening
when within a piece of video.
The automatically culled data is
then cleaned up with algorithms
and output to an XML file which
can be used in conjunction along
the timeline of a video. And this
can be done in real time with live
video, believe it or not. The tags can
then be further automatically
linked by algorithms to companion
content from reliable sources such
as Wikipedia and IMDB. Or even
linked to eCommerce sources such
as Amazon, eBay or the App Store
on the device itself.
Probably the best way is to use a
combination of both types of
tagging ‐ automated then
moderated/curated by humans.
There have been attempts to
create common XML standards for
the industry around EPGmetadata —
three broadcast industry initiatives
have been started to tackle the
problem. The earliest was DVB‐SI,
which is an integral part of the
digitalisation of TV in Europe and
other regions of the world. Two
other promising TV metadata
standards that build on the precedent
of DVB‐SI will soon be finalised.
TV‐Anytime, the first of these,
addresses the needs that arise from
high volume low cost storage (e.g.
PVRs and VOD services). The second,
MPEG‐7, is much broader in its
scope, seeking to provide tools for
describing all forms of multimedia
content delivered by the broadest
possible range of networks and
terminals.
TVANYTIME
The Brussels funded FP7 EU
NoTube project aims to show how
Semantic Web technologies can be
used to connect TV content and the
Web through Linked Open Data, as
part of the trend of TV and Web
convergence. They are focussing on
BMF 2.0 (Broadcast Metadata
Exchange Format), the rather outdated
TV‐Anytime, as an internationally
agreed and accepted metadata
schema in the TV consumer domain
and another barely used but
interesting egtaMETA from the
commercial side for adverts.
NoTube is a European research
project exploring the future of TV
in the ubiquitous internet that
includes the BBC and IRT as well as
a slew of university researchers
from across Europe.
Essentially NoTube will allow
disparate metadata interoperability
within the NoTube platform
creating metadata transformations
that are required to translate
metadata of external sources to TV‐
Anytime. In the course of the
metadata enrichment process in
NoTube, additional metadata is
then added to the TV‐Anytime
metadata sets, therefore pushing to
that standard.
■
The real
value lies in
providing
contextual
data on the
second
screen
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