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LIVE: Putting the TV viewer where the action is - at this year's Olympic Games
Broadcasting is changing. With the advent of everything from Mobile TV, IPTV and HDTV - what can we expect from this year's Olympic Games TV experience?
LIVE Olympic Trial Interface
Reporting real-time live action such as the Olympic Games has always involved a unique style of broadcasting. It involves capturing live action as it unravels, where anything can and so often does happen. However, despite today’s advances in technology and interactive TV formats it remains a single channel broadcast approach. At this year's Olympic Games in Beijing, LIVE, a European Union sponsored research project will test a new set of TV production tools and content formats that attempt to free the viewer from this single channel TV experience. The LIVE system will make it possible to produce a national Olympic TV programme in which thematically interlinked channels are produced on-demand according viewer feedback and the unfolding live action.
In the time-critical production process of live broadcasting there is little time to search databases for new material so archival content is usually pre-selected. This places a constraint on the ability of the production team to respond to unforeseen events or even satisfy creative impulses during a live broadcast. The innovation behind LIVE therefore is the ability to analyse, link and recommend content from multiple content sources in the spontaneous and fast moving environment of the live broadcast. The LIVE system during the live broadcast automatically analyses and aligns content coming in from the multiple incoming streams and available archive material. Additionally, feedback coming in from the TV viewers (switching behaviour and on-screen polls) is also analysed. The meaningful connections between viewer preferences and analysed video material are then processed in real-time and fed into the control room to guide the production process.
The LIVE production system will be tested at ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) during the Beijing Olympic Games. A total of 500 Austrian households will view and interact with the "LIVE Olympic Show". Over the two-week period a total of four interlinked channels will be produced. If successful, LIVE could change the way we view live events such as the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup or a political election - on a permanent basis. Beyond the clear advantage of having fuller coverage of the event itself, those irritating moments of not knowing about the details of a sporting event—e.g. details about the contestants, the history behind it or, information on the venue—will be conveniently dispensed with by the power of this latest and pioneering broadcasting information technology. But what might even be more important: For the first time it will be possible to serve the always diverse moods of viewers by simultaneously offering multiple points of view on one and the same live event. As in real life there is always more than one story to be told.
LIVE Project Information
LIVE is a research project partially funded under the European Union's IST Sixth Framework Programme. It was launched on January 2006 and will run for 45 months. The LIVE solution promotes a new, third market segment in the digital interactive television sector that does not exist today: intelligent television programming and services. This means creating non-linear, multi-stream and real-time content formats related to major media events, which adapt to the interests of the consumer. For this goal classical AV oriented media needs to be enriched with sophisticated metadata up to intelligent semantics, archive material and live streams have to be properly linked together in real-time, and TV consumer feedback has to be considered for convenient programme adjustments.
The LIVE consortium consists of the coordinator Fraunhofer IAIS (www.iais.fraunhofer.de), and the partners Academy of Media Arts (www.khm.de), ORF (www.orf.at), Atos Origin (http://atosorigin.com), University of Bradford (www.bradford.ac.uk), University of Ljubljana (http://ldos.fe.uni-lj.si), University of Applied Sciences Cologne (www.fh-koeln.de), Salzburg Research (www.salzburgresearch.at), and Pixelpark (www.pixelpark.com).
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