Satellite-based delivery of educational content to geographically isolated communities: A service based approach

Enabling learning for members of geographically isolated communities presents benefits in terms of promoting regional development and cost savings for governments and companies. However, notwithstanding recent advances in e-Learning, from both technological and pedagogical perspectives, there are very few, if any, recognised methodologies for user-led design of satellite-based e-learning infrastructures. In this paper, we present a methodology for designing a satellite and wireless based network infrastructure and learning services to support distance learning for such isolated communities. This methodology entails (a) the involvement of community members in the development of targeted learning services from an early stage, and (b) a service-oriented approach to learning solution deployment. Results show, that, while the technological premises of distance learning can be accommodated by hybrid satellite/wireless infrastructures,this has to be complemented with (a) high-quality audio–visual educational material, and (b) the opportunity for community members to interact with other community members either as groups (common-room oriented scenarios) or individuals (home-based scenarios), thus providing an impetus for learner engagement in both formal and informal activities

Event-Marketing as Innovative Marketing Communications: Reviewing the German Experience

As a result of significant changes in their marketing environments and in consumer behaviour, marketers are confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of their classic marketing communications (Kroeber-Riel 1984) and, consequently, in need of new ways to position their brands in consumers’ minds. Because nothing is more convincing than personal experiences (Nickel 1998), event-marketing creates new brand-related realities by staging marketing-events with which consumers interact. This would result in an emotional attachment to the brand (Zanger and Sistenich 1996). However, while event-marketing as an experience-oriented marketing communication strategy has become very popular among German marketing professionals and academics, researchers and marketers in English-speaking countries have widely ignored this innovative communication strategy so far due to a different understanding of the term (Cornwell 1995). Nevertheless, some European companies have successfully launched in recent years their first event-marketing campaigns in Ireland, the UK and the US, suggesting a much broader appeal than previously recognised. Thus, this paper is introducing event-marketing to an international audience by outlining its constitutive features and discussing its role in marketing communications, based on the lessons learned from the German experience, that are presented using mini-case studies

Customized television: Standards compliant advanced digital television

This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user’s or group of user’s preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information

(Re)contextualising audience receptions of reality TV

This paper seeks to recontextualise key findings from recent studies of reality TV audiences in light of insights drawn from across the wider field. It suggests that modes of engagement and response adopted by different reality TV audiences appear broadly consistent with those identified in relation to a wide variety of genres viewed in diverse national contexts, as charted in the Composite Multi-dimensional Model of audience reception (Michelle 2007). To further illustrate these parallels, this paper analyses online audience responses to a specific event that occurred during the 2006 reality game show, Rock Star: Supernova, applying the Composite Multi-dimensional Model as its conceptual schema. In so doing, this paper seeks to demonstrate how we might move beyond the traditional focus on specificities of genre and format to recognise and begin to theorise broader continuities in the nature of audience engagement that may persist beyond the transition to new, hybrid, and increasingly interactive media formats

Performance analysis of a caching algorithm for a catch-up television service

The catch-up TV (CUTV) service allows users to watch video content that was previously broadcast live on TV channels and later placed on an on-line video store. Upon a request from a user to watch a recently missed episode of his/her favourite TV series, the content is streamed from the video server to the customer's receiver device. This requires that an individual flow is set up for the duration of the video, and since it is hard to impossible to employ multicast streaming for this purpose (as users seldomly issue a request for the same episode at the same time), these flows are unicast. In this paper, we demonstrate that with the growing popularity of the CUTV service, the number of simultaneously running unicast flows on the aggregation parts of the network threaten to lead to an unwieldy increase in required bandwidth. Anticipating this problem and trying to alleviate it, the network operators deploy caches in strategic places in the network. We investigate the performance of such a caching strategy and the impact of its size and the cache update logic. We first analyse and model the evolution of video popularity over time based on traces we collected during 10 months. Through simulations we compare the performance of the traditional least-recently used and least-frequently used caching algorithms to our own algorithm. We also compare their performance with a "perfect" caching algorithm, which knows and hence does not have to estimate the video request rates. In the experimental data, we see that the video parameters from the popularity evolution law can be clustered. Therefore, we investigate theoretical models that can capture these clusters and we study the impact of clustering on the caching performance. Finally, some considerations on the optimal cache placement are presented

NoTube – making TV a medium for personalized interaction

In this paper, we introduce NoTube’s vision on deploying semantics in interactive TV context in order to contextualize distributed applications and lift them to a new level of service that provides context-dependent and personalized selection of TV content. Additionally, lifting content consumption from a single-user activity to a community-based experience in a connected multi-device environment is central to the project. Main research questions relate to (1) data integration and enrichment - how to achieve unified and simple access to dynamic, growing and distributed multimedia content of diverse formats? (2) user and context modeling - what is an appropriate framework for context modeling, incorporating task-, domain and device-specific viewpoints? (3) context-aware discovery of resources - how could rather fuzzy matchmaking between potentially infinite contexts and available media resources be achieved? (4) collaborative architecture for TV content personalization - how can the combined information about data, context and user be put at disposal of both content providers and end-users in the view of creating extremely personalized services under controlled privacy and security policies? Thus, with the grand challenge in mind - to put the TV viewer back in the driver's seat – we focus on TV content as a medium for personalized interaction between people based on a service architecture that caters for a variety of content metadata, delivery channels and rendering devices

Media fusion and future TV: Examining multi-screen TV convergence in Singapore

This study examines Singapore's national media blueprint and industry stakeholders' coping strategies in response to multi-screen TV development. The findings show Singapore muti-screen TV development is still at a nascent stage after launching Media Fushion and FutureTV plans in mid 2009. The policymakers play a key role to follow national media blueprint to unify the inter-industry and cross-country collaboration. TV operators and telcos are found to remediate themselves by harnessing the power of internet and mobile technologies for content innovation and distribution. To tackle the complicated convergent issues in multi-screen TV industry, this study proposes to separately regulate the technology-neutral platforms and diverse audiovisual content. It also recommends a pro-innovative policy with the light-touch licensing scheme and loose content regulation to facilitate the development of the next TV. --three-screen TV,multi-screen TV,convergence,media fusion,IPTV,mobile TV,cross-platform,TV technologies,TV market,TV policy