Personalized and mobile digital TV applications

The introduction of mobile and broadband networks in complement to the existing satellite, cable, and terrestrial platforms, opens new opportunities for interactive TV (ITV) applications. In addition, the widespread adoption of multimedia computing has enabled the processing of TV content on personal devices such as mobile phones and PCs. The above developments raise novel issues and require the adoption of new multimedia standards and application frameworks. In particular, the explosion in the amount of available TV channels over digital television platforms (broadcast or internet protocol) makes searching and locating interesting content a cumbersome task. In this context, personalization research is concerned with the adaptation of content (e.g. movies, news, advertisements). Personalization is achieved with the employment of algorithms and data collection schemes that predict and recommend to television viewers content that match their interests. In addition, the distribution of TV content to mobile devices over broadband wireless raises the issue of video quality. Video quality depends on many aspects of the video encoding systems, such as bit rate and algorithms that model human perception of video on small screens. In this article, we examine contemporary research in personalized and mobile digital TV applications. Moreover, we present a critical survey of the most prominent research and provide directions for further research in personalized and mobile digital TV (DTV) applications.