LinkedTV News: designing a second screen companion for web-enriched news broadcasts

LinkedTV (linkedtv.eu) is a European research project that explores how to integrate television content with Web content in meaningful ways through the use of semantic relations for automatically generating links. This report describes the process of design and evaluation of LinkedTV News, a second screen companion for interacting with hyperlinked television in the domain of newscasts. Our primary goal was to obtain knowledge about potential users of LinkedTV’s technology regarding their information needs and an indication of the reception that this technology could have among them. We performed two initial studies: a focus group and a series of interviews with 19 participants. These allowed us to identify our target group, context of use and requirements with which we created the concept of the application. The design of the application was refined through a series of design iterations and a hi-fi prototype was produced. After creating the LinkedTV News prototype, we evaluated it with a task-based study performed with 8 participants of the initial studies who matched the target profile closely. The main characteristics of LinkedTV News are: • It runs on a tablet PC. • It targets users between 25 and 45 years of age; highly-educated; who like to be up to date about the international news; watch news broadcasts regularly; and own a tablet computer or share it with someone in their household. • It proposes the integration of two activities that are related by subject, but currently often take place through different devices and at different times namely, watching TV newscasts and consulting online newspapers and videos. • It allows synchronous as well as asynchronous interaction with the television (interacting with the application while watching TV as well as bookmarking news and postponing their in depth exploration). • It offers two interaction modes represented by two main screens: lean back and lean forward. • The lean back mode presents condensed information related to the objects, places, persons, and events in the news continuously in the form of slides (a paragraph of text illustrated by an image). This mode is automatic and requires no user interaction, although interaction is possible if desired. • The lean forward mode enables in-depth exploration of each news headline in the categories: different sources; opinions of different authors; in-depth articles; timeline; and from the point of view of geo-localized tweets. We showed that LinkedTV News succeeds in fulfilling many of the user needs and requirements identified in the preliminary studies. Overall, there seems to be interest from users in a hypermedia solution for the news that integrates online newspapers and video with television broadcasts. The hi-fi prototype served as a tool for illustrating and sharing a future vision of hyperlinked broadcast news within and outside the LinkedTV project group. We recommend testing the application with a different and larger group of users. If the study proves successful, we recommend considering the production of a service represented by LinkedTV News as a commercial application of the LinkedTV technology

A companion screen application for TV broadcasts annotated with Linked Open Data

Increasingly, European citizens consume television content together with devices connected to the Internet where they can look up related information. In parallel, growing amounts of Linked Open Data are being published on the Web, including rich metadata about its cultural heritage. Linked Data and semantic technologies could enable broadcasters to achieve added value for their content at low cost through the re-use of existing and extracted metadata. We present ongoing work in the LinkedTV project, whose goal is to achieve seamless interlinking between TV and Web content on the basis of semantic annotations: two scenarios validated by user trials - Linked News and the Hyperlinked Documentary - and a companion screen application which provides related information for those programs during viewing

Second Screen Interactions for Automatically Web-Enriched Broadcast Video

Including hypermedia in broadcast video combines content formatted for a lean-forward medium (the Web) with a lean-back one (TV) to form a hybrid medium. We identify four challenges for interacting with and experiencing this new medium. We discuss the role a second screen may play in addressing these challenges

Deliverable D3.8 Design guideline document for concept-based presentations

This document presents guidelines on how to setup enriched video experiences. We provide user-centric guidelines on the named entities that should be detected and selected to effectively enrich video news broadcasts. This is presented in the form of a user study. We selected 5 news videos and manually extracted the candidate entities from various sources, such as the transcript, visual content and related articles. An expert was asked to also provide interesting entities for the videos. The resulting 99 candidate entities were presented to 50 participants via an online survey. The participants rated the level of interestingness of the entities and the usefulness of information from Wikipedia about these entities. Analysis of the results shows that users prefer entities of the type organization and person and have little interest for entities of the type location. They also indicate that subtitles are not enough as a source of interesting entities and that the amount of interesting entities can be improved by the combined use of subtitles with entities extracted from related articles or entities suggested by an expert. The expert suggestions showed to be more accurate than any other source of entities. Wikipedia seems to be a suitable source of additional information about the entities in the news, but should be complemented with additional sources. We provide engineering guidelines on how to present, aggregate and process content for TV program companion applications. We describe the content processing pipeline that was developed in WP3 to feed the content for the Linked News and Linked Culture demonstrators. This shows how content from the Web can be re-purposed to enrich videos by extracting the core display content and presenting it in a uniform way to the user

Deliverable D2.7 Final Linked Media Layer and Evaluation

This deliverable presents the evaluation of content annotation and content enrichment systems that are part of the final tool set developed within the LinkedTV consortium. The evaluations were performed on both the Linked News and Linked Culture trial content, as well as on other content annotated for this purpose. The evaluation spans three languages: German (Linked News), Dutch (Linked Culture) and English. Selected algorithms and tools were also subject to benchmarking in two international contests: MediaEval 2014 and TAC’14. Additionally, the Microposts 2015 NEEL Challenge is being organized with the support of LinkedTV

Deliverable D3.5 Requirements Document LinkedTV User Interfaces (Version 2)

This report describes the process of design and evaluation of LinkedTV News, a second screen companion for interacting with hyperlinked television in the domain of newscasts. Our primary goal was to obtain knowledge about potential users of LinkedTV’s technology regarding their information needs and an indication of how they perceive the technology. We performed two initial studies: a focus group and a series of interviews. These allowed us to identify our target group, the context of use, and the requirements with which we created the concept of the application. The design of the application was refined through a series of design iterations and a high fidelity prototype was produced. After creating the LinkedTV News prototype, we evaluated it with a task-based study performed with a selection of participants of the initial studies that closely matched the target profile

Interaction Design and User Needs for TV Broadcasts Enriched with Linked Open Data

Increasingly, people are consuming television content on devices connected to the Internet that allow them to look up related information. In parallel, Europe is publishing growing amounts of Linked Open Data, including rich metadata about its cultural heritage. The goal of the LinkedTV project is to seamlessly interlink TV and Web content to enrich the user’s experience of both. Linked Data and semantic technologies enable broadcasters to achieve added value for their content at low cost through the re-use of existing metadata. We present two user studies related to different user scenarios: Interactive News and Hyperlinked Documentary). These studies reveal the different user requirements and infor

Tangible air: An interactive installation for visualising audience engagement

This article presents an end-to-end system for capturing physiological sensor data and visualising it on a real-time graphic dashboard and as part of an art installation. More specifically, it describes an event where the level of engagement of the audience was measured by means of Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors and of the presenter through a sweater fitted with GSR, ECG and acceleration sensors. The gathered data was presented in real-time through a visualisation projected onto a screen and a physical electro-mechanical installation, which would change the height of helium-filled balloons depending on the atmosphere in the auditorium. Thereby trying to create a tangible way of making the invisible visible

Deliverable D3.7 LinkedTV User Interfaces Selected and Refined

This report describes the LinkedTV user interfaces. Based on the results user studies and the initial evaluation of the year 2 prototype we selected and refined the interfaces. We selected a single screen application that uses HbbTV technology to provide additional information about a TV program as an overlay on the TV broadcast. In addition, we worked towards TV program companion applications that are tailored for two domains: news and cultural heritage. With these applications we demonstrate different types of interaction modes, such as synchronized content on a second screen, and bookmarking chapters combined with the exploration of related content after the program. The interfaces are built on top of the Multiscreen Toolkit. We created a component-based infrastructure that allows us to quickly create tailored companion applications by reusing and configuring interface components. In the final part of the project we finalize this approach and test it by applying it to a new domain