An integrated multiple media news portal

The emerging multiple media portals accessed by a variety of terminals require semi- and fully automatic procedures for managing the material. The IMU (Integrated Publishing in Multimedia Network) trial system, developed in this work, automatizes parts of the news content acquirement and processing work of the portal web master. The IMU active proxy server extracts the metadata from news web sites and from the television news broadcasts through video analysis making an automatic classification and linking of related articles and TV clips possible. The deeply integrated material is partitioned into news composites called channels, which can be personalised by the user. The automatically computed event and media calendar allows for a new type of integration of news and up-coming events. The news content is refined by setting up filters for monitoring of the business environment. Through our interfaces for PC, TV, WAP and MP3 terminals, the user accesses the same news content at work, at home in the living room and on the move. To balance the automatic procedures with journalistic judgement, we created web tools for human editors to control and override the automatic operations and for creating new content. The community feature enables groups to share news and to discuss topics internally. The trial including closely 400 users with PC, TV and WAP terminals showed a stable interest in the service. The typical user retrieved a few fresh articles including a TV clip at prime time in the evening. The television set user retrieved two times more material than the PC user, but proportionally less news. The most popular channels for the TV-user were TV programme schedules and TV clips. The community channels attracted the TV set users. Personalization was used scarcely and searches even more seldom. The interviews showed that the system was well accepted, except for navigating in the TV-IMU application with the remote controller