• Media professionals who are willing to participate in the final user evaluations and test the project use cases
• Experts in the media industry who are willing to participate in the project focus group and steer the project developments
• Content providers to contribute own content

Interested? Contact us at your earliest convenience. We will be starting engaging external users from 2012 onwards!

Please see our downloads section for the updated presentation and for other documents that are of interest.

We welcome your feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us!

The document describes the overall user requirements and evaluation methodology for the iterative development approach of the euTV project. From our experience in user requirements and evaluations, we think that the approach described therein makes perfect sense for software development projects, and are happy to share it with you.

Looking forward to your feedback!

• The term “media monitoring” still holds and is very well capturing the input and processing tasks of the euTV scenarios
• The term “clipping” is restricting too much on the possible presentation, user interaction and output functionality of the euTV system and should be replaced by “publishing”.

Therefore the euTV platform scenario can be defined as “media monitoring and publishing”. Schematically the result of the analysis and the high-level features of the euTV platform are shown below.

• First, based on the scenarios envisioned in the Description of Work and the project advancements of the state of the art, defining the main application areas of euTV and identifying the central euTV platform scenario
• Second, investigating and detailing existing key players, the central euTV platform scenario, and its application areas
• Next, analyzing product features and functionalities, together with distribution channels of the key players and their monetising mechanisms
• Finally, deriving euTV user requirements and functionalities using foreseen project advancements over the state of the art and previously elaborated features and functionality of the key players.

We have selected to follow the above approach with an increasing user involvement during the course of the project because from our experience users find it difficult to imagine systems that do not currently exist and are reluctant to changes that are deviating from their current practice. Therefore, we start the initial user requirements elaboration using an expert-type approach which reflects the user requirements of the participating SMEs based on their knowledge of the market and the envisioned applications and also the analysis of key players related to euTV.

In the next phases we will continue with evaluating the outcomes and involve task-based evaluation approaches with users. If you would like to participate in the evaluations please drop us a line!

John’s adaptive channel

John is a fan of the soccer team of the FC Barcelona, and wants real-time updates on his favourite team and competing clubs. Therefore, he sets-up an adaptive channel that tracks all possible information streams relating to ‘football’. Picture following scenario: This week, FCB is playing Real Madrid. All fans have tuned in to analyse and compare official team constellations, assess team strengths and weaknesses, and exchange previous images, videos, and statistics. The adaptive channel allows for categorising and filtering of aggregate information based on John’s pre-defined criteria (i.e., identifying conflicting statements from team managers, checking previous games for verification, getting notifications on team constellation changes, etc.) Match time nears, but unexpectedly, John must travel to Singapore on business. The match back home has started whilst John taxis to his hotel. Upon entering his room, he opens up his adaptive channel, receives summary of key play scenes from time already missed watching, and connects to friends back home. John can now follow the game, perform on-the-fly comparisons with previous games, be faster at arriving at figures than official statistics, and, as always, be the most knowledgeable person on football amongst his peers.

Anne’s adaptive channel

Anne is producing short, time-critical commentaries on specific topics that she is contracted to research on. An important task is to perform speedy, comprehensive, comparative media analyses on recent and emerging topics. She needs up-to-date, real-time access to information streams and web audio-visual offerings, such as podcasts. Today, her research topic is immigration. Her already set-up adaptive channel has to be appended by specialised streams of immigration news. Within just 15 minutes, all relevant information is available, enabling her to easily browse through different search results and drop appropriate multimedia assets into her asset ‘basket’. After which, she starts previewing each of her basket items, selecting mark-in and mark-out positions of interest to her specific assignment, and thus producing final essay.

General media monitoring and clipping use case

A political party, due to contest an upcoming election, calls a media monitoring company, wanting feedback on where and how their candidate is being covered in the news. Different groups of voters will typically use different channels of communication and information, requiring comprehensive monitoring of all channels. Political TV shows, podcast broadcasts, and newspaper reports are some of above channels of information exchange. Information on opposing parties’ activities also needs to be obtained, condensed, and made searchable for comparative analysis. Aforementioned process should be totally automatic and pre-emptive, enabling timely responses to emerging political developments.

euTV derives from realisation that current aggregation services, and content retrieval and presentation tools have to evolve so as to empower users to extract and synthesise information from various digital domains and formats in the process of knowledge generation. By aiming at achieving interoperability of content across formats and semantic domains, the project results are expected to foster exciting new perspectives for European ICT research, along with innovative and lucrative business and societal applications. Moreover, euTV will be a great boon to the European Internet multimedia technology industry, especially its multimedia search sector.

The backbone of euTV is a scalable audio-visual analysis and indexing system that allows detection and tracking of registered streams of multimedia content based on Topics of Interest (TOI) corresponding to a user’s profile and employed search terms. The front-end is a portal that displays syndicated content, allowing users to perform searches, refine queries, and produce multifaceted presentation of results.

Looking forward to this exciting project and the opportunities it provides!