Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

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Web & TV convergence [W3C Workshop]

December 19, 2013

W3C announced a Fourth W3C Web and TV Workshop: Web and TV Convergence, 12-13 March 2014, in Munich, Germany. The Workshop is hosted by IRT.

The TV ecosystem is seeing large changes in terms of consumer behavior, creator demographics and technical capabilities. The effect on companies and organizations is profound leading to individual and collaborative efforts to turn challenges into opportunities. As the next generation of challenges arise, this workshop aims to assist market players in two main areas:

  1. Identifying the priorities for Web and television convergence and advising W3C on where to focus its efforts;
  2. Strengthening cooperation between those involved in the development of standards to avoid confusion and duplication of work.

Based on the success of previous similar workshops, we anticipate participation from broadcast and media companies, browser and software vendors (including embedded browsers), cable operators, content developers and providers, IPTV providers, multiple-system operators (MSOs), network providers and telecommunications companies, service vendors of cloud computing, standardization organizations related to Web and TV, television operators (broadcast, cable, satellite) and VOD operators. We intend the workshop to benefit the global media audience by resulting in such developments as new standardization work, best practices and renewed commitments.

W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all, but all participants are required to submit a position paper or statement of interest by 3 February 2014.

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TV, social media and Web apps at the 3rd FOKUS Media Web Symposium

February 6, 2013

Do not miss the upcoming 3rd FOKUS Media Web Symposium, March 14-15 2013!

Media and mobile Web experts, technology vendors and content providers are invited to meet in the vibrant city of Berlin, Germany, to spot and set trends as well as draw future roadmaps of Applications, Content and Technologies for a multiscreen world. The bulk of services in today’s mass market as well as the markets of the future will be based on Web technologies. Contents and Internet based services are being delivered to PCs, game consoles, TVs, smartphones, tablets and even cars.

At the 3rd Fraunhofer FOKUS Media Web Symposium, we will discuss which technical gaps and barriers have to be cleared to address all kind of viewers in a multiscreen environment. We will even go a step further opening for new business domains since Web based media technologies will be used for more than pure entertainment in the future. Smarter Cities and Internet of Things are also on the symposium’s agenda, which looks like this:

  • Day 1:
    • Two tutorials on Connected TV and Multiscreen App Development
    • Two workshops on:
      • TV – hybrid, smart, social, multiscreen – what is next?
      • Web Technologies for Smart Cities & Internet of Things
  • Day 2: Conference sessions on Smart Cities, Streaming Media, Web Apps, and more.
    • Dave Raggett (W3C team) will notably present “Smart cities as a Web of people, things and services

Registration is open and you still have time to benefit from the early bird ratebefore 14 February 2013!

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Web and TV: Device Discovery Identified as Top Requirement for Home Networking

December 7, 2011

With HTML5, Web technology is becoming a serious contender for implementing applications that in the past required writing native code. Much of the excitement around HTML5 is focusing on its new audio and video capabilities. So it’s only natural to look at to what extent Web technology can be used to implement today’s and future home-networking applications, such as “second screen” scenarios or access to home media servers.

That’s exactly what W3C’s Web and TV Interest Group did in recent months. They just published the result of their deliberations: a requirements document. Not only that, the group identified a major gap in current Web technology: the lack of device discovery, i.e. a means for an application to discover services and applications available on the home network.

As a consequence, work on device discovery for home networking has now started in the W3C Device API (DAP) WG . Most of the discussion is currently focussing on Web Intents, which has its own mailing list. Non-Web-Intents proposals for device discovery have been proposed by Opera/Cable Labs and the EU Webinos project.

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The “future TV” discussions in Rennes

November 15, 2011

The W3C/OMWeb team will participate at the upcoming “Recontres INRIA-Industries” event, this Thursday 17 November, in Rennes, France. This joint research-industry event will focus on topics such as: “What new standards to come? What new services to deploy? What opportunities for the 3D TV, the connected TV, and the interactive TV?”. The event programme will cover these topics and more.

Through a talk by François and demos at a booth, OMWeb will report on the W3C Web&TV impressive work initiated a year ago, with 3 workshops around the globe (Tokyo (Sept. 2010), Berlin (Feb. 2011), Hollywood (Sept. 2011)), the creation of a dedicated Interest Group and two task forces: the Home Network Task Force and the Media Pipeline Task Force. OMWeb will also demonstrate the power of HTML5 that will trigger new usages and services which will pave the road of the future TV…

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Convergence of Web and TV at NEM Summit 2011

July 28, 2011

For the second year in a row, I — where I stands for François Daoust, part of the OMWeb team — will be pleased to attend and present at the NEM Summit, 27-29 September 2011, in Torino, Italy. Last year, I focused on the HTML5 <video> tag, showing that it is a useful first step to integrate video on the Web, even though challenges remain. The slides Towards Video on the Web with HTML5 I presented back then, as well as the underlying paper are available online.

Thanks to a series of workshops on the convergence of Web and TV (a third workshop is to take place in Hollywood!) and the creation of the Web and TV Interest Group, W3C has been exploring challenges and potential solutions to ensure a successful convergence between Web and TV. The paper I submitted to NEM Summit this year, Adopting HTML5 for Television: Next Steps (PDF), presents key topics discussed in W3C (e.g. home networking scenarii, extensions to HTML5, etc.) and likely next steps from a standardization perspective.

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Proceedings of the Second Web and TV Workshop in Berlin

July 27, 2011

While preparing for the third Web and TV Workshop, in Hollywood, California, USA, 19-20 September 2011, you may want to review the discussions of the second workshop held in Berlin in February 2011. The materials of this second workshop have long been publicly available online but note that the proceedings of the Berlin Workshop are now available as a single ready-to-print document (PDF, 20.6MB) which includes the workshop report, minutes, as well as a copy of presented papers and slides.

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W3C Web&TV workshop in Hollywood (CfP)

July 11, 2011

The third W3C Web and TV Workshop will take place in Hollywood, California, USA, 19-20 September 2011. Hosted by Comcast Cable, this will continue the previous workshops (Tokyo Workshop and Berlin Workshop) efforts, with a particular focus on the needs of content creators and distributors. Anyone may participate in this workshop. A position paper is required from a presenter while a statement of interest is required from an observer. Both position papers and statements of interest are due 15 August 2011. Please see the Call for Participation for further details.

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Supporting commercial service provider requirements in HTML

June 23, 2011

As part of its exploration of requirements and potential solutions to ensure that the Web will function well with TV, the Web and TV Interest Group has launched a Media Pipeline Task Force, set to discuss requirements placed on the HTML5 video, audio and media interfaces by media formats that will be used for Web and TV.

While HTML5 already goes some way to bringing audio and video to the Web, there remain a few areas to address for commercial video service provider to propose high-quality services using the Open Web Platform. A few example use cases that could come to mind:

  • Enabling access to parameters controlling the adaptive bitrate algorithm (when such an algorithm is used) and more generically exposing statistics and metrics on media streaming performance.
  • Content splicing to link together media content in a continuous stream
  • Browser handling of dynamic tracks, for instance when the media stream is of indefinite duration, as happens on a TV channel.
  • Enhancements to media elements to augment the video experience with metadata sent in sync with the media stream

The Media Pipeline Task Force is to discuss and propose extensions to the <video> and <audio> elements to support these additional requirements and enable a quality of experience for videos on the Web similar to the one that exists in the traditional TV world.

This Task Force is the second task force of the Web and TV Interest Group. The on-going Home Network Task Force is actively working on a use cases and requirements document to enable home networking scenarios, such as using the Web browser on a mobile device to interact with the TV set.

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W3C Issues Report on Web and Television Convergence

April 6, 2011

The Web and television convergence story was the focus of W3C’s Second Web and TV Workshop, which took place in Berlin in February. W3C publishes a report that summarizes the discussion among the 77 organizations that participated, including broadcasters, telecom companies, cable operators, OTT (over the top) companies, content providers, device vendors, software vendors, Web application providers, researchers, governments, and standardization organizations active in the TV space. Convergence priorities identified in the report include:

  • Adaptive streaming over HTTP
  • Home networking and second-screen scenarios
  • The role of metadata and relation to Semantic Web technologies
  • Ensuring that convergent solutions are accessible.
  • Profiling and testing
  • Possible extensions to HTML5 for Television

Read the full press release.

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MPEG-LA under anti-trust scrutiny

March 4, 2011

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Justice Department is starting to examine whether MPEG-LA is breaking anti-trust with its call for patents that may be infringed by Google’s VP8 codec.

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