ConnectME – Connected Media Experiences
Today, media material is increasingly digital and shifting to delivery via IP and the Web, including cultural artifacts or broadcast television. This opens up the possibility of new services deriving added value from such material by combining it with other material elsewhere on the Web which is related to it or enhances it in a meaningful way, to the benefit of the owner of the original content, the providers of the content enhancing it and
the end consumer who can access and interact with these new services. Since the services are built around providing new experiences through connecting different related media together, we consider such services to be Connected Media Experiences (ConnectME).
In particular, much rich depth of information and service functionality associated to content in video is not derived today due to a lack of suitably granular description of video, including linking of video objects to the concepts they represent. For example, news reports about local tourism and events are not linked to tourist information and event–related services which a viewer may (spontaneously) wish to access and make use of.
The technological result of the ConnectME project will be an end-to-end service platform to host those added-value services over different networks, providing the common required functionality of each service: multimedia annotation and subsequent enrichment with related content from the Web, combined with the packaging and delivery of synchronized multimedia presentations to the end device. At the device, intuitive user
interfaces must be developed so that the selection of on-screen objects and the browsing of the associated content can be done in a non-disruptive and intuitive fashion. As a result, ConnectME facilitates a new interactive media experience built on top of the convergence of TV/video and the Web.
