Responsive Television

Responsive Television consists of a stream of media objects and procedural metadata that describes responses to viewer actions, identity, context, and equipment. Such a system enables providing personalized or responsive content even given a broadcast or multicast environment, and doesn’t require potentially sensitive information about the viewer to be transmitted back to the source. A barrier to such development has been the difficulty of authoring the associated metadata. We are developing a programming-by-example editing tool that allows the user to specify a few examples of variations associated with variables known to the display; the system then can generate generalized rules and embody them in software that accompanies the media objects.