Media Space Navigator: Navigating Video Content on IPTV Portals

Abstract

With the introduction of IPTV services, today broadcast and on demand services may be offered seamlessly. The growing amount of content creates a significant navigation challenge for the user that we try to resolve by providing a uniform way to access both services simultaneously.

The Media Space Navigator combines entries from Video on Demand sources with data about life shows from EPG feeds into a unified graph structure that links entries by similarity. Users can browse the graph via an interface that has been designed for casual browsing with a remote control: For each entry, it provides a ranked view of the most relevant neighbours, which are accessible using cursor buttons. By selecting an entry, users can either select a node, or directly jump to the content (either the broadcast channel or a payment dialog to access a stored movie).

The similarity measure is computed in a hybrid approach by merging different meta-data domains (film genre, actors, etc.), graph distance metrics and user preferences that can be entered casually during navigation: Rating entries with one to three plusses influences genre and actor weights in the similarity calculation.