LinkedTV · Television Linked To The Web

TV and the Internet are going through an exciting phase of convergence, with TV being delivered on-demand via the Web while access to Web content is ever more a part of the TV experience. The European project Television Linked To The Web (LinkedTV)" will bring this convergence to its fulfillment, neatly interweaving TV and Web content into a single, integrated experience. The "Networked Media Web" is a vision of a future media landscape in which online devices are ubiquituous and media is stored in and accessed from the 'cloud'. In this future world, television becomes just one more media source next to Web based media and other sources (e.g. home networks, shared private networks, Intranets). Citizens will choose and interact with any media at any time with any device, also switching between content easily and seamlessly. The Social TV revolution happening now shows how people want to enrich their media experience through sharing with friends and interacting during the programme. Linked TV is the next step, bringing the rich browsing experience people know already from the Web to television, enriching the access to audio-visual programming with associated content and allowing people to seamlessly delve into and browse content within the programme itself at the level of individual objects on screen or things which are mentioned or referred to. To achieve this ambitious goal of uniting the television experience with the Web experience, the LinkedTV project will develop several technologies and tools to analyse and annotate audio-visual content, interlink parts of the content with other content, deliver this enriched audio-visual content via different networks to the end user and provide intuitive user interfaces on the end device to allow easy access to and browsing of related content within the programme. These technologies and tools will be prototyped and tested by a public broadcaster, national media archive and a media arts centre to enrich the TV experience in the contexts of business, environment, cultural heritage and entertainment. As a result, Television Linked To The Web (LinkedTV) will provide every citizen a new, integrated, media experience which is both unlike the Web as we know it today and television as we know it today, yet combining the best of both: quality on-demand audio-visual material enriched with links to other content which is easily accessed and enhancing our networked media experience."