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

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Network Transformation

Customer Experience & Systems

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Applied TechnologyCentre

Innovation Central

Generation of Innovation Dividend

1. BT Research & Venturing organisation

Internal R & D only ‘Open innovation’

‘Open Innovation’ also means working closely with academic partners

• Research relationships with 23 UK academic institutions• Research relationships with 13 Global academic institutions

Research Relationships with 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

Formal InnovationCollaboration

• Global PhD students funded to support breakthrough technologies and innovations• Global Masters and undergraduate students funded to support breakthrough technologies and innovations

Focused Project SpecificFunding

• 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

Example Areas of Research

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.

2. BT’s digital media services provision (examples)

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

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 – combines digital terrestrial TV with broadband-powered entertainment on demand including film, music, children’s programming and interactive services.

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.

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 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.

Soft launch on 4Soft launch on 4thth December 2006 December 2006

BT Vision – a home hub and applications platform?

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.

• 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.

4. Research issues in future content and media

Driving BT’s innovative media services in

business and consumer markets

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 time-consuming 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)

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).

Creationmetadata

implicitsemantics

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