Digital Interactive TV and Metadata: New Paradigms in Interactive Broadcast Media (Engineering Online Library)

Rating:
Summary: DTV and metadata
Review:
One way to determine the level of growth of a research field is to assess the availability of relevant conferences, journals and books. In particular, the latter is a good measure of the maturity of the field, since they provide an overview of a critical mass of published work. In the interactive TV field, there been more than a few conferences and special issues in journals, but books are still scarce. So, it was a pleasant surprise to discover the book "Digital Interactive TV and Metadata", which was written by a very active team of researchers from the Digital Media Institute at the Tampere University of Technology, in Finland.

The first part of the book (Theory) begins with a short overview of DTV standards and the respective applications types that are enabled by this basic set of industry standards. Next, the book surveys the fields of Web, multimedia, DTV, in order to provide an extensive overview of metadata standards, which is the core focus of this work. Having laid the background theory, the authors present the "Digital Broadcast Item Model", which they have helped define, in the context of the MPEG21 standard. The first part of the book closes with a discussion of the implementation requirements for metadata in DTV systems.

The second part of the book (Application) begins with an interdisciplinary analysis of DTV in the fields of business strategy, consumer behaviour and narrative, all of which are put in a metadata context at the end of the chapter. Next, the authors describe the application of metadata in several DTV fields, such as digital rights management, production, interactive TV content, and personalization. The book closes with a discussion of a few innovative applications and future scenarios for DTV.

Overall, it is a rather accessible technical book for DTV and metadata. It is suitable for researchers and developers of DTV systems. In a field that is in constant growth it would have run the risk of missing recent developments, but the book is coupled with a web site that offers additional and up-to-date information (http://www.digitalbroadcastitem.tv/). Moreover, the website offers complementary slides, handouts and exercises that can be used for teaching a DTV and metadata module in university programs.

Rating:
Summary: A good starting point to Digital Interactive Multimedia
Review: This book covers some new and interesting topics in interactive digital multimedia industry, such as Digital TV, Metadata, Digital Broadcast, Digital Rights Management, Ambient Multimedia, and so on. This book provides you a broad and comprehensive view about the current multimedia application and service industry. It's the first book I have ever seen to cover so many key words and state-of-art technologies in this field. It's really a useful book for both beginners and advanced readers.

Besides the key words above, the book also covers many critical standards, from MPEG-2/4/7/21 to DVB/MHP. However, the author efficiently combined the standards, theories and practical examples, explains these profound things in a extremely simple way, which prevents you from tedious and difficult studying of these standards.

The authors focused on both the technologies and the applications. The vivid examples, and the coherent technology clue, make the reader easily get involved into the scenarios in this book. In addition, so many useful links and references make you easier to go deeper into specific topics. Furthermore, a web site has been create for this book. You can find more interesting information there.