Interacting with digital media at home via a second screen

In recent years Interactive Television (iTV) has become a household technology on a global scale. However, iTV is still a new technology in the early stages of its evolution. Our previous research looked at how everyday users of iTV feel about the interactive part of iTV. In a series of studies we investigated how people use iTV services; their likes, dislikes, preferences and opinions. We then developed a second screen-based prototype device in response to these findings and tested it with iTV users in their own homes. This is a work in progress paper that outlines the work carried previously in the area of controlling interactive Television via a second screen. The positive user responses led us to extend the scope of our previous research to look into other related areas such as barriers to digital interactive media and personalisation of digital interactive media at home

Converged digital TV services: the role of middleware and future directions of interactive television

The subject of the future of the interactive Television medium has become a topic of great interest to the academic and industrial communities particularly since in the recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation of convergence of digital TV systems and services. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of what we know as digital TV converged services, to present and categorise the digital Television middleware technologies that contributed to it, and to present possible future trends and directions. A new Television era of converged wireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content, multimodal interaction, intelligent personalisation, smart space awareness, and 3D content sensations is foreseen, creating ambient and immersive experiences

When Beckett on Film migrated to television

In the migration of drama from one medium to another a text is reshaped, and different audiences are addressed by adaptations because of the process of remediation. This article evaluates the significance of the intermedial migrations that happened to the "Beckett on Film" project in which Samuel Beckett’s 19 theatre plays were performed on stage, then filmed for an international festival, then shown on television in the UK, USA, Ireland and elsewhere. The analysis focuses on the television versions and shows how their distribution and reception contexts framed their meanings in different ways, and assesses how medial migration destabilised the object of analysis itself at the same time as the work became able to address multiple audiences and fulfil different cultural roles

The spaces of the Wednesday Play (BBC TV 1964–1970): production, technology and style

The BBC television drama anthology The Wednesday Play, broadcast from 1964-70 on the BBC1 channel, was high-profile and often controversial in its time and has since been central to accounts of British television’s ‘golden age’. This article demonstrates that production technologies and methods were more diverse at that time than is now acknowledged, and that The Wednesday Play dramas drew both approving but also very critical responses from contemporary viewers and professional reviewers. This article analyses the ways that the physical spaces of production for different dramas in the series, and the different technologies of shooting and recording that were adopted in these production spaces, are associated with but do not determine aesthetic style. The adoption of single-camera location filming rather than the established production method of multi-camera studio videotaping in some of the dramas in the series has been important to The Wednesday Play’s significance, but each production method was used in different ways. The dramas drew their dramatic forms and aesthetic emphases from both theatre and cinema, as well as connecting with debates about the nature of drama for television. Institutional and regulatory frameworks such as control over staff working away from base, budgetary considerations and union agreements also impacted on decisions about how programmes were made. The article makes use of records from the BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as published scholarship. By placing The Wednesday Play in a range of overlapping historical contexts, its identity can be understood as transitional, differentiated and contested

Performing the identity of the medium: adaptation and television historiography

This article focuses on how histories of television construct narratives about what the medium is, how it changes, and how it works in relation to other media. The key examples discussed are dramatic adaptations made and screened in Britain. They include early forms of live transmission of performance shot with multiple cameras, usually in a TV studio, with the aim of bringing an intimate and immediate experience to the viewer. This form shares aspects of medial identity with broadcast radio and live television programmes, and with theatre. The article also analyses adaptations of a later period, mainly filmed dramas for television that were broadcast in weekly serialised episodes, and shot on location to offer viewers a rich engagement with a realised fictional world. Here, film production techniques and technologies are adapted for television, alongside the routines of daily and weekly scheduling that characterise television broadcasting. The article identifies and analyses the questions about what is proper to television that arise from the different forms that adaptations took. The analyses show that television has been a mixed form across its history, while often aiming to reject such intermediality and claim its own specificity as a medium. Television adaptation has, paradoxically, operated as the ground to assert and debate what television could and should be, through a process of transforming pre-existing material. The performance of television’s role has taken place through the relay, repetition and remediation that adaptation implies, and also through the repudiation of adaptation

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2008

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

A query description model based on basic semantic unit composite Petri-Net for soccer video

Digital video networks are making available increasing amounts of sports video data. The volume of material on offer means that sports fans often rely on prepared summaries of game highlights to follow the progress of their favourite teams. A significant application area for automated video analysis technology is the generation of personalized highlights of sports events. One of the most popular sports around world is soccer. A soccer game is composed of a range of significant events, such as goal scoring, fouls, and substitutions. Automatically detecting these events in a soccer video can enable users to interactively design their own highlights programmes. From an analysis of broadcast soccer video, we propose a query description model based on Basic Semantic Unit Composite Petri-Nets (BSUCPN) to automatically detect significant events within soccer video. Firstly we define a Basic Semantic Unit (BSU) set for soccer videos based on identifiable feature elements within a soccer video, Secondly we design Composite Petri-Net (CPN) models for semantic queries and use these to describe BSUCPNs for semantic events in soccer videos. A particular strength of this approach is that users are able to design their own semantic event queries based on BSUCPNs to search interactively within soccer videos. Experimental results based on recorded soccer broadcasts are used to illustrate the potential of this approach

Performing television history

An expanded conception of performance study can disturb current theoretical and historical assumptions about television’s medial identity. The article considers how to write histories of the dominant forms and assumptions about performance in British and American television drama, and analyses how acting is situated in relation to the multiple meaning-making components of television. A longitudinal, wide-ranging analysis is briefly sketched to show that the concept of performance, from acting to the display of television’s mediating capability, can extend to the analysis of how the television medium ‘performed’ its own identity to shape its distinctiveness in specific historical circumstances

TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month