Metadata Broadcasting for Personalized Service: A Practical Solution

As the number of broadcasting channels and programs increases rapidly, the importance of personalized service has been emphasized. In this paper, we propose a practical framework of metadata broadcasting to provide personalized service according to user preferences and various terminal/network conditions. First, we present an overall system architecture of a metadata broadcasting system and then propose several core technologies (particularly in the parts of metadata authoring, metadata encoding, and metadata-based personalized content consumption). For interoperability, the proposed solution is designed to be compliant with the relevant standards of the TV-Anytime Forum, MPEG-7 Systems, and MPEG-2 Systems. Considering a home network environment, we also propose a metadata-based content adaptation scheme. Each component technology has been implemented individually, integrated into an end-to-end prototype broadcasting system, and successfully tested with a set of personalized service scenarios that are also developed in this study.