USING METADATA TO PROVIDE SCALABLE BROADCAST AND INTERNET CONTENT AND SERVICES

The convergence of broadcasting and the Internet, the growth of digital TV and the increasing user mobility are the main driving forces behind the European IST SAVANT (Synchronised and Scalable AV content Across NeTworks) project. SAVANT [1] aims to simultaneously employ broadcast and telecom networks to achieve added-value services for digital and interactive TV, using scalable content and scalable services to allow end users to retrieve interrelated and synchronised multimedia content on terminals with different capabilities under varying network conditions. This scalable approach implies the automated adaptation of content and services to different user terminals and user preferences. It also supports the intelligent distribution of content based on the capabilities of the networks present. The adaptation of content and services relies on content and media management, and semantics-based annotation, delivery and access. SAVANT aims to build on metadata standards, such as MPEG-7, TV-AnyTime and MPEG-21, to support the different aspects of automatic adaptation and personalisation. This paper examines different metadata standards for providing scalable content and services within the SAVANT system (Section 3) motivated by the SAVANT scenarios (Section 2).