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AmigoTV - A representative cross-over application scenario for multimedia broadcast and personal multimedia communications

Imagine you alone at home and watching a game of your favourite football team. No stadium to shout in, no pubs to socialize at, no friends to share your thoughts with. After the winning goal you wonder what a compelling experience it would have been if you could have shared this victory with your friends.

This example makes clear that a real experience consists in mixing three basic components:

  • Personal content: (Animated) photos, movies, but also content people like or recommend, e.g., the broadcast of the football game.

  • Rich communication: All forms of communication that people use in daily life: voice, text, video, gestures, showing emotions etc… In a football stadium people yell, use gestures and show their emotions in a very expressive way.

  • Community support: All enabling features needed for social networking like a buddy list, rich presence, invite a friend function, calendar…. These functions are the same people use to make appointments for going to the football game.

The concept of AmigoTV brings these components together by offering the possibility of having a real time communication over your favourite TV broadcast content with your friends in a lean backward manner, typical for TV experience.

As speech is the most natural way of communicating in most cases, AmigoTV users are offered voice communication as the primal way of interaction with their buddies. People are represented by their selected avatar in overlay on their TV screen. Their buddies, watching the same channel, also have the avatars shown on the screen.

 

Figure 1: Voice chatting over football, with the personal avatars

People can express themselves by adapting and pushing the emotion of their avatar (smiling, sad…). Another way to communicate is to select and push rich media emoticons to the buddies' screen. These emoticons can be image, video or audio based. They can be personalized and adapted to the content of the broadcast at that moment (e.g. letting a virtual referee swallow his whistle).

 

Figure 2: Sending an emoticon to your buddies

From an architectural point of view two new core functions need to be added to the traditional interactive TV architecture. The first component provides instant messaging and presence capabilities to applications. The second component provides audio-conferencing capabilities to applications. Both components consist of both client- and server-side elements. Presence information is essential to know which buddies are available to participate in an AmigoTV session. Instant messaging (IM) functionality is used to chat with the buddies in your room, to invite new friends and to join a room. Two candidate technologies were identified: SIMPLE (SIP for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions) and the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). XMPP is easy and extensible which is why AmigoTV has selected XMPP to develop its presence capabilities.

The presence/IM block in the server consists of an XMPP server with conference capabilities, which are by default present in XMPP (group chat, rosters—meaning a group of buddies-). Quite to our surprise very few and limited building blocks for large-scale voice-over-IP (VoIP) conferencing are available. Providing scalable (performance and cost) VoIP conferencing building blocks turns up to be one of the biggest challenges for realising the AmigoTV experience.

The room manager is a functional block on top of these components that takes care of room set-up, adding or removing buddies to rooms, etc., and makes sure that audio connectivity is in sync with the room memberships.

 

Figure 3: Architecture of AmigoTV

Integrated in the MediaNet reference architecture, AmigoTV provides an insight on how to create open interfaces for a large set of other multimedia services and contributes to the validation of the proposed MediaNet reference architecture.