FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CUT THE TALK – LETS MAKE THE BROADCAST PERSONAL
How the UCI Road World Bicycle Championships in Salzburg is playing its part in shaping tomorrows live sporting TV broadcast experience.
LIVE Scout Team
The live sporting broadcast is its own genre. It is the celebration of the moment. A moment of excitement and emotion that is captured, packaged and broadcast to a large audience. However, despite today’s advances in technology and interactive TV formats it remains a single dish broadcast approach served to all viewers alike, because regardless of what draws you to the broadcast you will find yourself locked into a pre-packaged one fits all TV viewing experience.
At LIVE (a European Union funded project under the Sixth Framework Programme) it is our mission to go beyond this pre-programmed linear approach to TV broadcasting of live sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup or Olympics – to deliver digital broadcasting technologies and content formats that enable viewers to shape their own personal viewing experience as they watch the broadcast. Our approach begins by challenging the common assumption that television is a sit-back passive activity, especially in the area of live sporting broadcasts. Instead we believe that the production value chain cannot stop at the point of transmission, but must integrate the needs and interests of the viewers in a real-time asynchronous intelligent programming environment - to deliver a personal and interactive viewing experience.
This emerging intelligent programming environment also involves a new breed of TV production professionals - our so called Video Conductors, who are asked to synchronize and link parallel video channels (multiple channels presented on the single screen linked by theme) and information clips at special points in time to allow the viewer to switch channels due to his/her interests or mood during the live sporting broadcast. The switching between and time spent on respective channels can for example indicate to the Video Conductor the viewers wish to explore specific content themes further - for example: the viewers interest to view an athletes biography or receive further clarification on the teams strategy being played out on screen. To adapt content according to viewers interests in a real-time environment requires advanced intelligent tools which support the Video Conductor to navigate, search and package content in a complex media landscape which in this case is a multitude of relevant archives (TV broadcast material, news archives, documentary archives), that provides a smorgasbord of rich multimedia content to create fresh viewing experiences.
The LIVE project will take advantage of the fact that its partner ORF is the host broadcaster of the UCI Road World Bicycle Championships in Salzburg to gain unique access to the live sporting production and broadcasting environment. This experience will be the basis for the first LIVE prototype testing phase in October 2006 when within a simulated real-time production and broadcasting environment the tools and working concepts will be tested to create non-linear multi-stream video broadcasts which respond to viewers feedback. The exhaustive testing and developing phase will culminate in a demonstration of the LIVE technology within the context of the Summer 2008 Olympics in China to a defined group of TV viewers in Austria.
The LIVE partners are: Fraunhofer Institute Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, ORF, ATOS Origin, University of Bradford, the University of Ljubljana, the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Salzburg Research, and Sony NetServices.
For additional information please consult http://www.ist-live.org.
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