Proceedings of the seventh european conference on European interactive television conference

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 7th European Interactive Television Conference -- EuroITV2009. EuroITV2009 is a forum for professionals not only from Europe, but from all over the world who are interested in, work with and do research on all aspects of interactive television. This year the conference is held in the lively university town of Leuven, Belgium on 3, 4 and 5 June 2009. This annual conference features state-of-the-art academic as well as practitioner's work on different aspects of interactive television, e.g. IPTV, mobile TV, digital content production, entertainment computing, usability and user experience evaluation, and future technologies and systems. EuroITV2009 is the seventh edition of the EuroITV conference series, which started in 2003 and has since been growing steadily. The conference has been held twice in Brighton (UK), and subsequently in Aalborg (Denmark), Athens (Greece), Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Salzburg (Austria). The theme of the 7th European Interactive Television Conference is 'Networked Television.' Interactive television is becoming one piece in a bigger puzzle of different interconnected devices. This not only has technical implications, but also impacts users and television viewers. Viewers use their cell phones to send text messages to broadcasters, they use their PC to download movies that can then be watched on the big television screen, social networks are including TV content and iTV is including social network features, secondary screens can be used to control the content on television, etc. Instead of an age of device convergence, we see that in practice we're heading towards device divergence. The conference addresses how we should shift our focus from looking at iTV as a system that functions on itself, to iTV as part of a bigger set of networked devices and communities, and explores how this impacts users as well as technologies. We received 91 full and short paper submissions, of which 36 (40%) were accepted and published in these main proceedings, next to numerous submissions in the other categories of which the accepted papers can be found in the adjunct proceedings. This resulted in a very diverse conference program, consisting of three keynote speakers, five tutorials, four workshops, 15 full and 21 short paper presentations, iTV in Industry presentations, poster and demo sessions, and a doctoral consortium attended by six PhD students. The academic and research papers are clustered around three tracks, addressing the multidisciplinary nature of iTV research: Human-Computer Interaction; Social, Media & Economic Studies; and Systems & Enabling Technologies. In the iTV in Industry section, interactive television topics are presented which are especially relevant to the industry concerning amongst others research and development, marketing, business cases, market insights, showcases, case studies, best practices and lessons learned. The conference also features an arts exhibition on the theme of networked television. This arts exhibition is being held for the first time in the EuroITV conference series. The keynote speakers address different aspects of the conference theme 'Networked Television.' Jan Van Bogaert, senior strategy director at Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs Fellow, talks about how the connected home redefines the TV experience and argues that networked TVs will become the main interface to a whole new set of home based applications and content delivery mechanisms. Rich Ezekiel, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Yahoo!'s Connected TV group, explains that by combining the key attributes of the Internet, including openness, community and personalization with the power of television, it will be possible to create a revolutionary new Internet experience to allow consumers to access the relevant information and content to enhance their television watching experience. Mr. Ezekiel discusses why past efforts have been unsuccessful and why this Internet-connected TV ecosystem being created and nurtured today will become a technology accepted by millions of TV viewers globally. The third keynote presentation is given by Prof. Dr. Marc Hassenzahl, professor for "Ergonomics and User Experience in Design" at the Folkwang University in Essen, Germany and research manager at MediaCity, Abo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland. He discusses current approaches and research into 'Experience' and their potential future application in the domain of iTV and crossmedia products, as they specifically aim at providing an entertaining, positive and enjoyable overall "experience" to its users.