TV viewing has undergone a tremendous change during the past twenty years. Originally, TV viewing was a social activity, fostering social interaction with communities of viewers. A host of technical developments has caused TV viewing to become more personalised, but also less communal.According to researcher Pablo Cesar at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, it is time to bring social communications back to TV viewing. This month his new book ‘The Evolution of TV Systems, Content, and Users Toward Interactivity’, was published. This book, part of the respected series ‘Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction’, examines how viewers interact with TV content.
The domain of multimedia systems and social communications is one of the research areas at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Cesar conducted a study on the developments and evolution of TV-systems during the past twenty years. The result is a reference survey that is aimed at students and researchers, as well as practitioners and developers. It gives an overview of the evolution of TV systems, TV content, and TV users toward social interactivity.
By introducing the concepts of content editing, content sharing, and content control, the book provides a framework for the study of previous technical developments and research publications. Content editing corresponds to the creation of content, historically the domain of professionals but more recently dominated by the current surge of user generated content. Content sharing, refers to all kinds of social activities that might occur around television watching, such as chatting about television content and sharing content. The third concept, content control, corresponds to the further personalisation of watching TV, rendering content on a wide range of physical devices such as mobile and pc.
“I am interested in systems and tools that allow people to improve their communications and make them feel more connected“, says Pablo Cesar. “Sharing content of a program you are watching with relatives or friends is one of the topics I am currently researching.”
‘The Evolution of TV Systems, Content, and Users Toward Interactivity’ also looks at how research in this area has spanned a rather diverse set of scientific subfields. The interaction across areas such as multimedia, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative work (CSCW), User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), user modelling, media and communication sciences is clearly demonstrated. The book also gives insights into why the full potential of interactive TV has not yet been fulfilled.
The authors
Pablo Cesar is a researcher at the ‘Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica’(the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands) in Amsterdam. He has (co)authored over 40 articles (conference papers and journal articles) about multimedia systems and infrastructures, media sharing, interactive media, multimedia content modelling, and user interaction. He has given tutorials about Interactive Digital Television in prestigious conferences such as ACM Multimedia and WWW Conferences. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~garcia
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos is a lecturer in the Department of Informatics, at the Ionian University (Greece). In 2002, he founded UITV.INFO (http://uitv.info ), which is a newsletter and Web portal for interactive television research resources. He has been researching interactive TV since early 2000. http://www.ionio.gr/~choko
