Smartmedia: Locally & Contextually-Adapted Streaming Media

Abstract

Streaming media is gaining popularity, with numerous new services for video on demand and live broadcast. These services stream requested media content to user devices like smart TVs, personal computers and smartphones. Many of these devices are mobile devices, yet streaming media services do not adapt the delivered content to the context of the request, e.g., the location of the user, the time of the request or who are the people near the viewer. In this paper we illustrate how geofencing and geoblocking can be combined with adaptive streaming media to create a new technology of contextually-adapted streaming media. The new technology has the potential to create a new type of experience for streaming media by applying real-time modification of streamed content according to the viewer and the context, e.g., modify inappropriate content when the media is played in public places, change the length of a video played by a train passenger according to a train schedule, etc. The suggested technology can also be used for preventing password sharing in a non-intrusive way and for hyperlocal geoblocking, to facilitate copyright protection. We discuss the vision of modifying streaming media in real time based on the context, elaborate on some of the challenges in implementing this vision, and present novel applications of this new technology.