Ubiquitous TV with HTML5

Abstract

The wide adoption of small and powerful mobile computers, such as smart phones and tablets, has raised the opportunity to employ them in multi-user and multi-device iTV scenarios. In particular, the standardization of HTML5 and the increase of cloud services have made the web browser a suitable tool for managing multimedia content and the user interface, in order to provide seamless session mobility among devices, such as smart phones, tablets and TV screens. In this paper we present architecture and a prototype that let people transfer instantaneously the video they are watching between web devices. This architecture is based on two pillars: Websockets, a new HTML5 feature, and Internet TV (Youtube, Yahoo Video, Vimeo, etc.). We demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed architecture in a prototype that employs the Youtube API and that facilitates seamless session mobility in a ubiquitous TV scenario. This flexible experimental set-up let us test several hypotheses, such as user attention and user behavior, in the presence of multiple users and multiple videos on personal and shared screens. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.