'TV Format Protection through Marketing Strategies?'

Commercially successful programme ideas are often imitated or adapted. Television formats, in particular, are routinely copied. Starting from radio formats in the 1950s to game shows and reality programme formats of today, producers have accused others of “stealing”. Although formats constitute one of the most important exports for British TV producers, there is still no certainty about the legal protection of TV formats from copycat versions. Since TV formats fail to fall neatly within the definitions of protected material under international copyright and trade mark regimes, producers have been trying to devise innovative means to protect their formats from plagiarism. The globalization of cultural and entertainment markets may itself have contributed to the rise of TV formats, interconnecting programming industries in a world of multiplying channels. This paper theorizes that global broadcasting and programme marketing strategies can also be used by TV format producers to protect their formats. Specifically, eight different strategies may be used: (a) trade show infrastructure and dynamics; (b) visual brand identity and channel fit; (c) brand extension and merchandising; (d) corporate branding; (e) national branding; (f) genre branding; (g) constant brand innovation; (h) fan communities. The paper develops a methodology for capturing the use and effectiveness of these eight strategies in preventing the copying of formats

“TV Format Protection through Marketing Strategies?”

Commercially successful programme ideas are often imitated or adapted. Television formats, in particular, are routinely copied. Starting from radio formats in the 1950s to game shows and reality programme formats of today, producers have accused others of “stealing”. Although formats constitute one of the most important exports for British TV producers, there is still no certainty about the legal protection of TV formats from copycat versions. Since TV formats fail to fall neatly within the definitions of protected material under international copyright and trade mark regimes, producers have been trying to devise innovative means to protect their formats from plagiarism. The globalization of cultural and entertainment markets may itself have contributed to the rise of TV formats, interconnecting programming industries in a world of multiplying channels. This paper theorizes that global broadcasting and programme marketing strategies can also be used by TV format producers to protect their formats. Specifically, eight different strategies may be used: (a) trade show infrastructure and dynamics; (b) visual brand identity and channel fit; (c) brand extension and merchandising; (d) corporate branding; (e) national branding; (f) genre branding; (g) constant brand innovation; (h) fan communities. The paper develops a methodology for capturing the use and effectiveness of these eight strategies in preventing the copying of formats

A generic news story segmentation system and its evaluation

The paper presents an approach to segmenting broadcast TV news programmes automatically into individual news stories. We first segment the programme into individual shots, and then a number of analysis tools are run on the programme to extract features to represent each shot. The results of these feature extraction tools are then combined using a support vector machine trained to detect anchorperson shots. A news broadcast can then be segmented into individual stories based on the location of the anchorperson shots within the programme. We use one generic system to segment programmes from two different broadcasters, illustrating the robustness of our feature extraction process to the production styles of different broadcasters

Improving the quality of the personalized electronic program guide

As Digital TV subscribers are offered more and more channels, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to locate the right programme information at the right time. The personalized Electronic Programme Guide (pEPG) is one solution to this problem; it leverages artificial intelligence and user profiling techniques to learn about the viewing preferences of individual users in order to compile personalized viewing guides that fit their individual preferences. Very often the limited availability of profiling information is a key limiting factor in such personalized recommender systems. For example, it is well known that collaborative filtering approaches suffer significantly from the sparsity problem, which exists because the expected item-overlap between profiles is usually very low. In this article we address the sparsity problem in the Digital TV domain. We propose the use of data mining techniques as a way of supplementing meagre ratings-based profile knowledge with additional item-similarity knowledge that can be automatically discovered by mining user profiles. We argue that this new similarity knowledge can significantly enhance the performance of a recommender system in even the sparsest of profile spaces. Moreover, we provide an extensive evaluation of our approach using two large-scale, state-of-the-art online systems—PTVPlus, a personalized TV listings portal and Físchlár, an online digital video library system

Student centred legal language study

The article introduces parts of a self-study programme for LLB (Europe) German students, which include the use of satellite TV and CALL. The whole self-study programme was tested for two years at the Nottingham Trent University. This paper focuses on the rationale of the study programme, pedagogical objectives and theoretical considerations within the context of language learning as well as the students’ evaluation. The evaluation shows that overall the package was seen as a positive learning experience. CALL can be a solution to the problem of limited materials for languages for specific purposes. The use of mixed media is possible for language teaching for specific purposes without having to be combined in multimedia computer-based programmes. CALL can also be a solution to the problems caused by reduced contact time

Peckham TV

Peckham TV is a collaborative project by the artists Harold Offeh and The People Speak. The project is the result of a period of research carried out by The Mothership Collective into the future of Peckham. Following a series of workshops with local young people to develop ideas, the Peckham TV Public Event broadcast a live mix of public opinion in a game show format creating a collective vision for the future of Peckham. The event featured 3d visualizations and footage from workshops screened via a large LED screen. There was an open mic session and a Peckham TV expert panel on hand with their views. In a grand finale, participants voted on their favourite advert idea to decide on a new identity for the public face of Peckham. The final advert was screened at Peckham Multiplex on Tuesday 14th October, as part of Southwark's Black History Month programme, and online. It was concluded that ‘it is not Peckham that is the problem, it is the media’s representation of it’

Resource reuse in ie-TV

The convergence of communications and information technology within education, as well as more widely, means that concepts developed within ITS & AIED are now applicable to a wider range of wired, and more interestingly 'wireless', technologies. In [1] we outlined the educational rationale of a Broadband User Model (BbUM) that would support the individualisation of the interactions, both between the technology and a user and between collaborating users, for a system able to deliver a variety of resources in a range of media, including interactive TV. At the heart of any such system there needs to be a database of resources from which the user, the educational designer or the system itself, including the user model, can select. Some of these resources will be items that were developed for other purposes, such as self-contained TV programmes, books or simulation programs. Others will be resources developed with such a system in mind. In either case the use and reuse of these resources depends on careful tagging at a level of granularity that enables them to be used both in their entire original form as well as in parts. For example, imagine that a TV programme is being indexed and that it consists of a number of items, originally in a chronological sequence. The tagging might indicate that one item is analagous to another or generalises it. Labelling the items makes explicit some of the implicit pedagogic relationships that underpin the design of the original programme. This enables the possibility of recomposing the TV programme in some other sequence that reflects a different overall pedagogical structure to the original. Moreover, each item is also tagged in terms of its position in some domain scheme. A prototype system has been implemented that employed a database searchable in a variety of ways, including the keywords matched against video/TV captions and/or automatically transcribed speech. Metadata included such fields as ID, title, ownership, media type, format, and duration. Content categorisation included topic, target user group, and interactivity. Form categorisation included problem, concept, description, and explanation or example

“Do you really enjoy the modern play?”: Beckett on commercial television

Television was the key popular medium of the second half of the twentieth century in the UK, and Samuel Beckett’s work was consistently aired by BBC, the British non-commercial TV broadcaster that had already featured his work on radio since the mid-1950s. But it is not generally known that his work also appeared on Independent Television, the commercially-funded British television channel set up in 1955 to rival BBC. The commercial ABC TV company made the series The Present Stage for the national ITV network in 1966. In its feature announcing the series, the TV Times listings magazine asked “Do you really enjoy the modern play like Look Back in Anger or Waiting for Godot?" ITV’s first half-hour programme on Waiting for Godot followed DIY expert Barry Bucknell’s demonstration of techniques for laying carpet. The following week’s episode, including extracts from Godot, was preceded by Bucknell’s advice on paving garden patios. This chapter asks what it meant for the ITV commercial channel to make a programme about Beckett’s drama in this context. Moving outwards from the example of The Present Stage, the chapter places Beckett’s drama in a time of dynamic and exciting instability in British culture, when the categories of the popular and the elite were being contested, to argue that Beckett’s work contributed to a cultural revolution

Audio and video processing for automatic TV advertisement detection

As a partner in the Centre for Digital Video Processing, the Visual Media Processing Group at Dublin City University conducts research and development in the area of digital video management. The current stage of development is demonstrated on our Web-based digital video system called Físchlár [1,2], which provides for efficient recording, analyzing, browsing and viewing of digitally captured television programmes. In order to make the browsing of programme material more efficient, users have requested the option of automatically deleting advertisement breaks. Our initial work on this task focused on locating ad-breaks by detecting patterns of silent black frames which separate individual advertisements and/or complete ad-breaks in most commercial TV stations. However, not all TV stations use silent, black frames to flag ad-breaks. We therefore decided to attempt to detect advertisements using the rate of shot cuts in the digitised TV signal. This paper describes the implementation and performance of both methods of ad-break detection

European Court of Human Rights: Arlewin v. Sweden

On 1 March 2016 the European Court of Human Rights found Sweden in breach of the European Convention because it had denied access to court for a person who wanted to bring defamation proceedings in Sweden arising out of the content of a trans-border television programme service (TV3) resorting under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. The European Court is of the opinion that requiring a Swedish national to bring defamation proceedings in the UK courts following an alleged defamatory TV programme broadcasted by the London-based company Viasat Broadcasting UK, but targeting mostly, if not exclusively, a Swedish audience, was not reasonable and violated Article 6 § 1 of the Convention, guaranteeing access to court