Content Morphing: A Novel System for Broadcast Delivery of Personalizable Content

Abstract

Truly personalized, interactive multimedia broadcast remains an unfulfilled promise. Technologies such as TVGuide Interactive and Personalized Video Recording (PVR) have attempted to push the frontier, but remain limited in their scope and applicability. Specifically, any recording fixes the ‘storyline’, i.e. the sequence of events in the presentation. In this paper, we describe a novel method for personalized content broadcast that enables personalization at different levels, from conventional program-by-program to minute-by-minute granularities. Instead of one linear presentation, we enable the parallel broadcast and/or storage of multiple variations of the same presentation, any one of which can be chosen for viewing at a given time. This is done by a synthesis of several techniques, including modeling and representing the presentation as a trellis graph. Recorded content captures one or more of these versions depending on user interests. Suitable (pre-existing) metadata schemes are harnessed to describe the content segments and user profiles, and to match the same. During any viewing session, a user first chooses (as usual) to view one presentation from the available broadcast and recorded options. Using our technology and the metadata engine, the user can then further choose between different versions of this chosen presentation.