PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The TV sector is facing many drastic changes and witnessing a rapid transformation. New technologies such as interactive TV, High Definition TV, Very high capacity Personal Video Recorder (HD-DVB, Blu-Ray mobile storage), Home Theatre Systems, Video On Demand, Personal TV, etc. are entering the market. Today the television is moving from “provider centric” to “viewer centric”, from TV watching to TV blogging and community TV.
The COTV (Community TV Content Making) project aims at implementing a ‘Community TV’ where the TV viewers collaborate with TV producers for generating mixed “user” and “professional” content via TV blogs.
The communication infrastructure used is satellite for broadcast and a broadband solution for the return channel that includes Sat Triple Play and UMTS. Mobile phones are used for pictures and video input and GNSS is used for geo-localised content mapping.
Challenges
Each of the main actors of the COTV business chain have a range of key issues that must be addressed as follows:
COTV Production Player issues:
The COTV Production Player (TV Content Professionals) will be faced with the need to create COTV applications that will enable TV viewers to collaborate in the “making of” tasks via TV blog templates.
COTV Aggregator Player issues:
The COTV Aggregator Player (TV Channel) will be faced with the need to package the content stemming from the TV Producers and from TV Viewer Community via a “community server” accessible to all for content uploads, view, vote, publishing, etc.
COTV End-user Viewer issues:
The COTV End-user Player (TV Viewer Community) will be faced with the need to view, assess, and rate the TV creation from other viewers and to be able to create in the easiest, seamless and fun way his TV blogs. It should be totally intuitive and fast.
Plan
The COTV project will be implemented over a 24 months period in 5 major milestones as follows:
- Milestone 1 (T0+5) with all the COTV user and system requirements being defined,
- Milestone 2 (T0+7) where the detailed COTV system architecture is conceived,
- Milestone 3 (T0+16) where the alpha version of the COTV environment is implemented and tested,
- Milestone 4 (T0+18) where the beta version of the COTV environment is field deployed for a 6 month pilot phase,
- Milestone 5 (T0+24) where all the findings of the pilot phase are collected and analysed and recommendations for the commercial exploitation suggested.
The different COTV activities have been organised along related and interacting tasks, in order to optimise the available resources and to secure high quality results, as follows:
Current Status
The pilot phase was successfully closed in April 2010 and the Final Review milestone held on the 18th of May 2010.
The introduction of the mid-term pilot review milestone (February 2010) allowed to correct bugs and to improve the users’ interfaces.
The COTV service is now well perceived by the pilot users and their contributions have finally met the initial expectations. The strategic objectives of the project have also been finalised via commercial agreements among the partners for the COTV commercial roll out.
A 15 months CCN activities is ongoing. This extension will enable the COTV environment to comply with the recently emerged HbbTV / CE-HTML / HTML5 market driven standards. Click “here” to visit the CCN extension web page.
