HTML5 and companion web technologies as a universal platform for interactive Internet TV advertising

In this paper, we propose, design and develop a prototype interactive TV Commercial (iTVC) for the Internet Connected TV using only web technologies instead of propriety APIs or Adobe Flash, which are the most common methods up to date. The main advantage of this method is that developers can use a technology that is, or will be in the near future, compatible with most, if not all, different connected TV platforms, as the adoption of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript is constantly gaining ground among Connected TV manufactures. We will show that, using these technologies, all of the features of a typical interactive Ad (Advertisement), such as navigation, video, audio, animation etc can be easily achieved and therefore it is a much better choice for authoring universal interactive Advertisements that will work in most platforms instead of re-developing the same Ad for each platform. © 2012 IEEE

Web on TV - Designing web content for enhanced user experience on an internet-connected television device

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe Internet is gradually expanding to many new devices, in addition to its original native environment that was the Personal Computer. This wave started with mobile devices and as we enter the Internet of Things era, connectivity is possible from cars to light switches. One of the first devices, to follow mobiles, is the Television. Connectivity and two-way interaction on the TV device has in fact started even in the first days of the medium, but had failed to make it widely available, due to technological limitations of the past. Now, this has changed, with the Smart TV devices that can utilize the fast internet connections that are available in most developed countries. However, even though the technology and devices are now widely available there are still challenges in order to make the vast Internet and web content available in the Smart TVs. These challenges, have a familiar resemblance to what happened a few years ago, when internet connectivity was introduced on the mobile phone. Although, it was “feasible” to access any webpage from your mobile device, the experience for the user was often very frustrating, due to many factors, that derived from the fact that the web was designed for large screens and mice of the desktop computers, not the small touch screens and limited hardware of the phone. Nonetheless, these obstacles were successfully overcome, by introducing techniques and methodologies (e.g. Responsive Web Design) to make the web more mobile-friendly and also work from the manufacturers to improve their devices to this direction as well. The success of these actions is now evident, since the access to the web from mobile devices has surpassed the PC, and it is now a standard practice for every new website to be mobile-friendly. In this research work, we will attempt to do one very significant step towards this direction for the Smart TV. In other words, to discover what has to be done to make the web more TV-friendly. To do this, we explore many different TV devices from several manufacturers and see their similarities and differences. We explore numerous user studies and surveys to discover what is the problem in the Web experience on the TV, so that we can propose solutions to make web content TV-friendly. Based on these findings, we design prototypes and put them to the test on different devices and userevaluation. Finally, we propose a set of guidelines, that web designers can apply on their websites to make them TV-friendly, in the hope to introduce the first step towards a friendlier internet era for the TV