Transcript Slide 1

Digital Convergence: The
Challenges and Opportunities for
BT’s Future in Networked
Multimedia Services
Li-Qun Xu
BT Research and Venturing, Group
Chief Technology Office
Talk outline
Introduction to BT’s research & venturing
BT’s digital media services provision (examples)
BT Vision – BT’s broadband powered TV
Research issues in future content and media
Discussion
1. BT Research & Venturing organisation
Research Centres
Ventures
Generation of
Innovation Dividend
Innovation Central
Foresight
Foresight
Security
Security
Intelligent Systems
Applications
Broadband
Applications
Broadband
Pervasive
ICT
Pervasive ICT
Mobility
Networks
Networks
& Applications)
(Infrastructure
IT IT
& Applications)
(Infrastructure
Mobility
Centre
Mobility
Asian
Applications
Broadband
Research
StrategicResearch
Strategic
Broadband
ICT
Applied Technology
Centre
Network Transformation
External Venturing
Customer Experience &
Systems
Centre for the Customer
Business Support
IPR Licensing
Partner & Supplier
Relationship
CTO
Internal R & D only
‘Open innovation’
‘Open Innovation’ also means working closely with academic partners
Research
Relationships with Global
Academic Institutions
Formal Innovation
Collaboration
Focused Project Specific
Funding
Example Areas of Research
• Research relationships with 23 UK academic institutions
• Research relationships with 13 Global academic institutions
• Research programmes with DTi, MoD and EU 6th Framework
- DTI project on Traffimatics
- EU project on spectrum-agile cognitive wireless access radio protocols
- MoD project on information fusion
• “BT CMI Collaboration”: MIT, Cambridge, UCL and Oxford University
working together in three research centres:
- The Centre for Competitiveness and Innovation
- The Communications Research Network group
- The RFID and Supply Chain group
• Global PhD students funded to support breakthrough
technologies and innovations
• Global Masters and undergraduate students funded to support
breakthrough technologies and innovations
• MIT: “Customer Advocacy” - how to radically improve
relationships with customers
• UC Berkeley and Stanford: “Communications Architecture” – future
requirements for a global networking architecture
• Cambridge University: “Transportation Information Monitoring
Environment” – how to support large-scale customers with
complex information requirements in the future
2. BT’s digital media services provision
(examples)
BT PodShow – This is BT’s entry into the social networking space, the
service is accessible to all UK Internet users and enables creative
individuals, media production companies and record labels to share music
and video content, giving aspiring rock stars and movie makers a
worldwide audience.
BT Digital Vault - the free service which allows people to store music,
video, photos and virtually any other files securely online.
BT Fusion - the fully converged fixed-mobile service for residential
users as well as corporate institutions.
BT Movio – TV on the move, is the first wholesale offer in the world to
combine live TV, DAB digital radio, a 7-day programme guide and red
button interactivity for mobile phones. TV content partners for the service
include BBC1, ITV1, E4, Channel 4 Shortcuts and ITN.
BT Vision – A unique triple-play entertainment offer in addition to
Freeview channels.
To ensure the QoS delivery as well as have a constant stream of innovative services
for business, professional and personal life, providing digital experience that are
intuitive, engaging, and relevant.
3. BT Vision – broadband powered TV
Soft launch on 4th December 2006
BT Vision – combines digital terrestrial TV with broadband-powered
entertainment on demand including film, music, children’s programming and
interactive services.
BT Vision is delivered through a new set-top box - the V-box. This contains a
PVR able to store up to 80 hours of content, pause or rewind live TV and
record programmes at the touch of a button.
BT Vision also features a "replay TV" service, allowing customers to catch up
with some of the broadcast TV programmes they may have missed during the
previous week.
BT Vision will also launch a sports service this summer. Following a deal with
Setanta (Irish pay-TV firm), BT Vision Sport customers will have access to the
Setanta Sport channel and its 46 live FA Premiership games, 60 live games from
the Scottish Premier League and other sports.
They will also have access to the 242 “near live” on-demand FA Premiership
games secured by BT earlier last year. That means three-quarters of all FA
Premiership games will be available in full to BT Vision Sport customers.
BT Vision – a home hub and applications platform?
• BT Vision will shortly also use broadband to deliver more special
interest programming. And there will be new interactive services
based around audience participation, voting, gaming, gambling and
communications - enabling customers to chat with each other or use
video telephony to talk face-to-face whilst watching programmes.
• BT Vision will also provide a platform for user-generated content so
that customers can share their videos, photographs and music with a
wider audience.
• BT and its partner Vodafone UK are working together to enhance the
recently announced Vodafone at Home service by offering these
customers a version of BT Vision.
BT Vision promises “to shake up the broadcasting industry by offering a mixture of
top-flight football, movies, music, classic TV shows and other on-demand services
without a monthly subscription”, wrote The Guardian.
4. Research issues in future content and media
Broadband TV research challenges
Interactivity and Personalisation
Broadband has the potential to deliver new forms of interactive and personalised
TV programmes, but how will these be created, how will consumers interact, what
kinds of personalisation do they want, and will such formats be compelling?
Personal content
Through digital video, consumers have been empowered as producers; through
broadband they will be able to create their own TV channel. But what tools will they
– and their “subscribers” - need in order to make sense of the massive amount of
personal content that is being created?
Search and retrieval
How can we help consumers deal with the problem of too much choice? Can we
identify means by which it becomes straightforward to rapidly discover programmes
that interest me from a global pool of available content?
Broadcast + Broadband?
How can we enable advertisers and creative professionals to leverage the rich
interactivity available from a set-top box platform which seamlessly combines both
digital broadcast and broadband content delivery?
Some research issues
Implicit semantics extraction and affective content modelling
Certain semantic concepts are implicit as well as difficult and timeconsuming to annotate. Advanced tools are in need to automatically acquire
these elements (e.g., prevailing mood of a clip, emotion-based
segmentation, highlights, abstraction, violent, romantic, etc).
The understanding of video content and affective states in this way will
facilitate automatic matching/insertion/flagging of suitable commercials with
the video context as well as meeting the users’ affective request of video
content.
Network-aware multimedia processing and delivery
In the era of network and multimedia convergence, a QoS guaranteed video
delivery service will need to consider two aspects concurrently concerning
both what to deliver (content characteristics) and how to deliver (network
architecture, work flow, routing, etc).
Network-aware methods make use of the network characteristics in their
design, to intelligently take advantage of infrastructure and content
characteristics. Network-aware delivery aspects include solutions with
emphasis on a stronger integration among higher layers of protocol stacks
including application layer.
User preference and interactive behaviours modelling
How to build a comprehensive profile of a user through
analysis of his/her request/access of/to particular videos
with both
Explicitly available of creation metadata (e.g., genre,
director, leading actors, story description, comments,
rating, etc, that could come as part of the video
document or searchable from other on-line web
sources) and
Automatically extracted implicit semantic annotations
(e.g., highlights, video summary/skimming, story
segmentation, prevailing mood, fast or slow tempo,
etc)
Creation
metadata
implicit
semantics
as well as the on-line (dynamic) behaviours such as
the way the user watches/interacts with the video
content, i.e. if he or she watches the video (the
narrative story) in a linear fashion or in a purposely
nonlinear manner (e.g., enter into a specific episode,
pause at a particular scene, skip certain segments,
repeat watching a certain scene, etc).
User
interactions
Summary
Introduction to BT’s research & venturing
BT’s digital media services provision (examples)
BT Vision – BT’s broadband powered TV
Research activities in future content and media
discussion
Thank You