Video Breakthroughs

We’ve been talking about ACR (automatic content recognition) in blogs and at conferences for quite some time now (most recently, the 10th prediction for second screen trends in 2013).  For many players in the ecosystem (including consumers), the ability to trigger an event on the second screen based on what is happening on the first screen is somewhat of a holy grail of enabling technology capabilities.  But as we discussed at NAB in April and at IBC in September, this has so far remained elusive in terms of real scale for consumers reached because of the challenges inherent in each of the various approaches.

The aim, the company says, is to take today’s fast-growing but chaotic landscape of TV “companion” apps – such as ones delivering athlete stats to people watching the Olympics, or crime-fighting details to CSI junkies—and make it easier to create and see such additional content.

The Akamai proof of concept—shown for the first time to MIT Technology Review last week—consists of a few parts. The first is a piece of software that would reside on whatever device you use, whether it’s a television set fed by a cable or satellite service, a set-top box delivering content over the Internet, or even a DVR playing a recorded show. A one-time authentication process links your tablet or smartphone to the device.

Real-time information on what show you’re watching—even as you change the channel—gets sent to Akamai’s servers. Relevant secondary information then gets streamed directly back to your smartphone or tablet in near real-time.

France Telecom’s Viaccess-Orca launched a service package for second screen integration and engagement with a focus on enhanced metadata at IBC2012.

Called DEEP (Data Enrichment and Engagement Platform), the package enables pay TV operators to link PCs, tablets, smart phones, games consoles and other IP devices in the home more tightly to the service, and stimulate further activity around the content.

DEEP builds on existing standards such as DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) that facilitate automatic device discovery, and also on browser technology, adding new metadata creation methods developed by Viaccess-Orca itself, along with key contributions from two partners, TVersity and Audible Magic. TVersity provides the media server technology on top of DLNA, UPnP or the browser to enable devices to exchange content, supporting games consoles, most set top boxes, Blu-ray players, smart TVs, phones, PCs, and tablets. This comes as software loaded onto a PC, which can then discover devices automatically if they are DLNA or UPnP client. If not then the device can join in by pointing its browser to the PC.

Audible Magic’s contribution is its patented SmartID and CopySense automated content recognition (ACR) system using digital fingerprint technology to identify content by analyzing either audio or video image signals. Audible Magic claims that the system identifies content correctly over 99 percent of the time with zero false positives, at sub-second response time, and can do it on video clips down to five seconds in length.

Two of the major challenges for apps developers in 2012 will be to enable second screen synchronisation with the main TV experience and to harness voice and possibly gesture recognition, which are set to become a feature of high-end connected TVs, with Samsung leading the way. During CES, Accedo, one of the leading apps developers for connected TV (covering games through to Pay TV operator TV Everywhere apps) highlighted its work in both these areas and the company expects these developments to have an important impact on the user experience. It looks like the third major focus could be social TV, which is closely tied to companion screen and synchronised experiences anyway, and the continued development of ‘remote control’ type functions for companion devices, which is made possible via an apps download to a tablet or smartphone, for example.