Content syndication platform for personalized content guide on IPTV

Abstract

The emergence of IPTV made watching online videos on TV possible. IPTV also made watching TV program or video content on user’s demand possible. However, at the early stage of IPTV, online videos were impossible to be served on TV since the IPTV service platforms were designed mainly to convey legacy broadcasting channels. The content aggregation and management system for on-demand service had limitations on content supply and packaging. To overcome these limitations, this dissertation proposes a content aggregation and syndication system, named as CANSS which aggregates and manages variety of differently formed contents and metadata by their contract so that can be served in both linear and on-demand. In addition, when an IPTV service platform handles both online and broadcasting contents, then the number of contents can be served adds up huge and increases enormously. However, the number of contents can be shown on one TV screen is quite strictly limited due to common readability. That is, IPTV service providers are facing a big challenge for choosing which contents to be displayed at the top pages among more than a hundred million contents. To link proper contents with different users, grasping the characteristics of contents and the interests of each user is very important. Metadata, which contains additional, explaining, and helpful information around the videos, service, user, and the user’s community activity, gives all the information required to generate the personalized program guide. Hence, this dissertation also proposes a metadata processing mechanism throughout the entire IPTV service procedures so that enables personalized content guide generation.Personalization in IPTV means interpreting the available video contents according to each user’s taste and viewpoint. For the successful personalization, developing methods to catch the individual user’s appetite and preference at the moment as specifically as possible is needed. In this matter, this dissertation proposes an enhance metadata creation and utilization method, i.e., serving a video into an image carousel form as well. Extracting multiple key frame images with full script of the video and serving in image carousel form increases the potential and efficiency of the video linkage and usage especially in social network services. By tracing users’ activity in image unit, IPTV service provider can collect more detailed and precise metadata. Proposed CANSS, metadata processing mechanism, and the enhance metadata creation and utilization method had been implemented and registered in US patents and KR patents. Field test and evaluation of the proposed system by its implementation revealed that composing an IPTV service with both broadcasting and online contents using specified video consumption metadata and community metadata is very effective. The value of proposed mechanisms had demonstrated via technology transfer and patent sales not to mention the service trends of IPTV industry. Based on this experience, research on ways to capturing user’s interests via extended content-related context and enlarging links between the user and contents will be keep conducted.