Television is a mature mass media with close to eight decades of regular broadcasts since its beginnings in Germany, the UK and the USA. Today, despite the spectacular growth of the Internet and social networks, television is still the leading medium for entertainment and information across the world, exerting an unparalleled influence on public opinion. Until recently television had undergone a rather slow evolution regarding the interaction with its users, yet this is beginning to change. The ongoing trend of digitalization has accelerated the process, and the computational capacity of televisions and set-top boxes has increased the possibilities of communication and implementation of services. This book provides the first descriptive and structured presentation of the TV-Anytime norm, which will standardize information formats and communication protocols to create a framework for the development of novel and intelligent services in the audiovisual market. The standard, the dissemination of which has been entrusted to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, ensures manufacturers and service providers that their products will be presented to the widest possible market, without fear of being constrained by the wars of interest typical for emerging technologies. The individual chapters provide detailed descriptions of the new standard’s most important capabilities and contributions, including metadata management, customization and personalization processes, uni- and bidirectional data transfer, and remote receiver programming. Overall, the authors deliver a solid introduction to the standard. To ensure a better understanding of concepts and tools, they present a wide range of simple examples illustrating many different usage scenarios that can be found when describing users, equipment and content. This presentation style mainly targets professionals in the television and broadcasting industry who are interested in acquainting themselves with the standard and the possibilities it offers.

Recent years have brought many changes to the world of mass media. The In ternet and mobile communications technology have provided consumers with interactive digital services. Television is catching up with this trend through the digitalization process. Digital television is a hybrid platform combining elements from classical analog television and the Internet, providing modern multimedia services on a familiar platform. In short, digital TV is a gateway to the world of interactive digital media. Digital TV brings consumers into the television service arena and offers them new degrees of freedom. However, as the service and multimedia content types diversify and the services and their content increase, television is facing many of the same challenges of complexity and information overflow faced by other digital media. Metadata can handle the diverse services and content of digital TV effi. ciently and in a consumer-friendly way. Metadata means that the data are accompanied by other data which describe them. As data about data, meta data can provide an insight into syntactically and semantically complex data by distilling their essence to a set of simple descriptors. Metadata also helps to structure and manage information in diverse settings. The use of metadata in broadcast multimedia should not be restricted to being merely a tool for coping with the challenges of a complex networked multimedia environment. Instead, metadata ofTers new opportunities for the development of innovative services.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Interactive Television, EuroITV 2007, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 2007. The volume covers a wide range of areas such as media studies, audiovisual design, multimedia, HCI, and management. The papers are organized in topical sections on social TV systems, user studies, the future of TV, social TV evaluation, personalization, and mobile TV.

Finally, a book on metadata for the media professional!

Over recent years most business processes have changed in various dimensions (e. g. , ?exibility, interconnectivity, coordination style, autonomy) due to market conditions, organizational models, and usage scenarios of information systems. Frequently, inf- mationisrelocatedwithinageographicallydistributedsystemaccordingtorulesthatare only seldom de?ned as a well-codi?ed business process. This creates the need for a so- ware infrastructure that enables ubiquitous mobile and collaboration systems (UMICS). The anywhere/anytime/any means paradigm is becoming the major challenge in conceiving, designing, and releasing next-generation information systems. New te- nologies, like wi-? networks and 3rd-generation mobile phones, are offering the infr- tructure to conceive of information systems as ubiquitous information systems, that is, systems that are accessible from anywhere, at any time, and with any device. Ubiquity is not yet another buzzword pushed by emerging technologies, but is mainly a means to support new business models and encourage new ways of working. This new wave of UMICS will exploit the knowledge developed and deployed for conventional infor- tion systems, but will also need new concepts, models, methodologies, and supporting technologies to fully exploit the potentials of the enabling infrastructure and to be ready for the challenge. Moreover, people need to move across organizational boundaries and collaborate with others within an organization as well as between organizations. The ability to query the company’s distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but mobility brings new access scenarios and higher complexity.

We are delighted to welcome readers to the proceedings of the 6th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM). The first PCM was held in Sydney, Australia, in 2000. Since then, it has been hosted successfully by Beijing, China, in 2001, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2002, Singapore in 2003, and Tokyo, Japan, in 2004, and finally Jeju, one of the most beautiful and fantastic islands in Korea. This year, we accepted 181 papers out of 570 submissions including regular and special session papers. The acceptance rate of 32% indicates our commitment to ensuring a very high-quality conference. This would not be possible without the full support of the excellent Technical Committee and anonymous reviewers that provided timely and insightful reviews. We would therefore like to thank the Program Committee and all reviewers. The program of this year reflects the current interests of the PCM’s. The accepted papers cover a range of topics, including, all aspects of multimedia, both technical and artistic perspectives and both theoretical and practical issues. The PCM 2005 program covers tutorial sessions and plenary lectures as well as regular presentations in three tracks of oral sessions and a poster session in a single track. We have tried to expand the scope of PCM to the artistic papers which need not to be strictly technical.

"Introduction to MPEG-7": Ein unentbehrliches Nachschlagewerk für Elektronik- und Kommunikationsingenieure, die MPEG-7-kompatible Systeme entwerfen und implementieren wollen sowie für Forscher und Studenten, die sich mit Multimedia-Datenbanktechnologie beschäftigen! Prinzipien und Konzepte der Indizierung von audiovisuellem Material, Metadatenbeschreibung, Informationsabfrage und Browsing sind einige der angesprochenen Themen. Detailliert wird auf die wichtigsten Tools zur Indizierung und zum Abruf von Bildern und Videosequenzen eingegangen. Die mitgelieferte Demo-Software führt schrittweise in die Multimedia-Systemkomponenten ein.