Online Video and Interactive TV Experiences

Media production and consumption are a central part of everyday life. People love to create, curate, and share media content using a variety of devices. It is no surprise, then, that leading device manufacturers, service providers, start-up innovators, and research groups are all vying to push the limits of these systems to create novel and compelling interactive experiences. As a result, media production and consumption have become a complex, highly interactive, personalized, and distributed ecosystem of connected devices, people, and narratives. Examples include the development of simultaneous and distributed multiscreen experiences and the interweaving of televisual content with social media and communication platforms. Creating truly compelling multimodal and distributed media experiences is not an easy task. Key challenges range from storytelling and narrative development to building the technical expertise for capturing, annotating, editing, managing, and distributing content. More crucially, professional producers and broadcasters need to develop the skills to elicit, curate, and interweave contributions from amateur and pro-am producers, who make up the increasingly active audience and user community. Once the dominant channel for media consumption, television—both as a platform with highly controlled, non-editable broadcast offerings and as an audience experience—has changed dramatically as a result of these technical and social innovations in interactivity, content malleability, and multiple device and format capabilities.