Leveraging the user impact: an architecture for secondary screens usage in an interactive television environment

This paper reports on an architecture, and a working implementation, for using secondary screens in the interactive television environment. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the television experience, there are situations in which people perform as well a secondary task, whilst watching. In the living room, people surf the web, use email, and chat using one or many secondary screens. Instead of focusing on unrelated activities to television watching, the architecture presented in this paper aims at related activities, i.e., to leverage the user impact on the content being watched. After a comprehensive literature review and working systems analysis, the requirements for the secondary screen architecture are identified and modelled in the form of a taxonomy. The taxonomy is divided into three high-level categories: control, enrich, and share content. By control we refer to the decision what to consume and where to render it. In addition, the viewer can use the secondary screen for enriching media content and for sharing the enriched m aterial. The architecture is validated based on the taxonomy and by an inspection of the available services. The final intention of our work is to leverage the viewers’ control over the consumed content in our multi-person, multi-device living rooms.