eTV: The convergence of Web and TV

Jeane Chen

IBM Internet Media

TV and the Web evolved from distinct origins for very different purposes. TV was designed as an entertainment device, with broadcast video content, and passive user interface. The Web evolved as a data communication network carrying primarily two-way data, and the user interface is interactive. However, as the Web infrastructure improves in many fronts including bandwidth, processing power, and compression technologies, rich media such as audio and video start to proliferate in the Web. At the same time, TV infrastructure is getting ready to migrate to digital where data, in addition to video, can be easily accommodated as they are all carried as bits. These trends are leading toward a convergence of content, infrastructure, and receiving devices, thereby opening up huge opportunities. There are many active pursuits from a diverse array of industry players seeking to take advantage of this convergence. This paper posits that content will be the main driver in this convergence. It will be the content which wins the acceptance of viewers/end users who will define the specification for the receiving engines/devices, and this in turn will drive the requirement of the network infrastructure.

In this paper we present HotVideo, an IBM technology positioned to address content convergence in various infrastructures including Internet, Intranets, enhanced analog TV, and digital TV. HotVideo is a hyper-video technology enabling hyperlinking of dynamic objects in the main video to other resources such as text, audio, video, and Web pages. With this capability, the video content can be expanded to a multidimensional information space and results in a brand new medium type which we call "eTV", where "e" stands for enhanced, expanded, and Web energized. HotVideo provides a unified production tool for eTV in all infrastructures and generates a consistent data format which can be received and decoded by different optimized clients for each platform.