Interactive Television

Broadcast Multimedia, Arthur Lugmayr, Samuli Niiranen, and Seppo Kalli, Springer, 2004, $80, 254 pp., ISBN 0-38720843-7. In the 1930s, television gradually found its way into consumers’ homes. With the introduction of color TV in the 1960s, it became a widespread and highly accepted consumer product. It has taken another 40 years to bring a new innovation into the world of TV: the digitalization of broadcasting and the introduction of interactivity. This new technology requires that we rethink how broadcasting will evolve during the next few decades in terms of service concepts, interactive services, and broadcasting processes. Services such as video on demand, file downloading, and electric program guides are just the beginning. Interactivity lets the consumer directly interact with content and change the narrative flow of a presentation. Besides digital interactive TV, the buzz word metadata (or data about data) has emerged in the world of multimedia. Metadata enables media management, content annotation, content packaging, and media search and retrieval. As the first book to deal with metadata in broadcasting, Digital Interactive TV and Metadata presents a new way to look at digital interactive TV. A special focus of the book is on the relationship between the consumer and broadcaster in the time of interactivity. The book nicely reflects standardization processes, new paradigms in broadcasting, metadata architectures, and visionary application developments. The book also illustrates many new metadatadriven ideas from the technology, consumer, and content points of view. It conceptualizes a metadata-based broadcast architecture. The authors show a deep understanding of broadcasting and how to use metadata throughout the broadcast value chain. Even so, the book discusses more than technological issues—it also deals with application scenarios and service concepts. Part 1: Theory Digital Interactive TV and Metadata is structured into two parts. The first part focuses on technology for metadata and includes a comprehensive overview of standardization efforts (including Multimedia Home Platform [MHP], MPEG-2, Digital Video Broadcasting [DVB], and Advanced Television Systems Committee [ATSC]), metadata fundamentals (such as MPEG7, MPEG-21, Scalable Vector Graphics [SVG], and DVB-HTML), and system architectures for metadata (such as Web deployment architectures, the Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP], and network protocols for metadata transmission). This part is especially suited for teaching purposes and gaining an in-depth view of digital interactive TV. It gives a nice overview of metadata in broadcasting, which is currently hard to find in existing works. The MPEG-21 sections are especially interesting because they provide so much detail; descriptions in other literature remain rare. In addition, this book includes the first real-world application scenario of MPEG-21 that led to the idea of the digital broadcast item (DBI)—an MPEG-21-based, value-chain spanning metadata framework for delivering digital services to the consumer while minimizing production costs. Chapter 3 gives a nice look into the theoretical foundations of metadata. It describes formal language theory and how metadata models are derived that manifest today in XML. Chapters 4 and 5 give an excellent overview of how to deploy metadata in digital broadcasting systems. The chapters present complete system architectures of broadcast stations or Web-based feedback channel networks including their network protocols.