ZapTV: Personalized user-generated content for handheld devices in DVB-H mobile networks

Abstract

During the last years, we had witnessed the boom of the digital market due to proliferation of emergent audiovisual services and increasing number of broadband networks. In this scenario, users insistently demand for innovative services for exchanging and sharing their own audiovisual contents and productions. In order to meet these needs, in this paper we propose the ZapTV system. Broadly speaking, this tool broadcasts user-generated audiovisual contents for handheld devices in a mobile network based on the DVB-H broadcasting standard. ZapTV offers diverse added-value services to these new active users, such as: (i) multi modal access (via Web and by handheld devices) to digital contents anywhere and anytime, (ii) availability of a return channel to transmit interactive contents that enhance the user's viewing experience, and (iii) annotation, sharing and personalized distribution of audiovisual contents. To achieve these goals, our system adopts both well-known technologies for broadcasting and semantic annotation of audiovisual contents (such as DVB-H and TV-Anytime), and emergent technology from the so-called Web 2.0, which permit the users to actively cooperate in tasks of generation, annotation and classification of digital contents. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.