May 23

ReTV partners met in Thessaloniki to prepare first project outcomes

  • May 23, 2019
Rasa Bocyte
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The ReTV project has almost reached its halfway point and on 15-16 May, the project partners met at the Centre for Research & Technology, Hellas in Thessaloniki to review the milestones achieved so far and plan for the next steps. During a two-day meeting, partners shared updates on all aspects of the project – from technical developments and user testing to dissemination activities and stakeholder engagement.

The project has entered an important phase where technical partners are developing the first prototypes and demos and content partners are getting ready for tests with stakeholders. Since the last project meeting (read the blog post here), ReTV partners have been hard at work refining user scenarios and implementing them. RBB and Sound and Vision – the use case partners in the project – have been conducting consultations with their stakeholders and translating them into requirements. Based on these requirements, the technical partners have been working on a number of different components: temporal annotation, event extraction and prediction services (MODUL Technology), a Visual Dashboard for trending topics (webLyzard), Viewer Profiling, Recommendation & Scheduling components (Genistat) and finally Brand Detection, Video Fragmentation & Annotation and Video Adaptation & Repurposing Web services (CERTH). Together these will form a Trans Vector Platform (TVP) driving the innovative new ReTV scenarios:

  • A Topics Compass to guide users in finding the trending topics among their audience, including what topics will be of interest in the future. webLyzard presented a new version of the dashboard that will be the basis for the Topics Compass. See the tweet below how this will look with an example analysis of opinions and perception of Game of Thrones in social media since 1 April 2019.
  • A Content Wizard which allows users to map an identified topic to a content item in their collection that can be scheduled for future publication. NISV shared updates on the wireframes for the Content Wizard, to allow editors to easily prepare video summaries using the CERTH tools and services and publish them on their prefered media channels.
  • 4u2 considers how to improve content recommendations on broadcasters Web sites. RBB and Genistat shared updates about work on a chatbot which will be able to recommend content to the user based on insights into topic popularity and audience interests.
  • Content sWitch is a tool which allows broadcasters to personalise their in-stream content according to the viewer, while preserving privacy. Genistat showed a demo of the tool which personalised which ad is shown to which viewer while watching an online TV stream. See also our latest blog about this scenario.

To make sure that all the service components (see image below) match the desired scenarios, the partners came together during an interactive session to map what is needed on a technical level against the four scenarios. Overlaps, connections, opportunities and missing links were detected. This proved to be a valuable exercise that helped us identify key components in each scenario and focus our attention on improving and innovating them even further.

ReTV Service Components

Shifting focus from technical components to the needs of our stakeholders, the partners also joined forces in creating elevator pitches for the four ReTV scenarios. These pitches helped us further define how ReTV tools can address the challenges that broadcasters and media archives face today in the digital landscape and what innovative solutions ReTV can offer for them.

We will be presenting the first ReTV demos at several events in the upcoming months, which gives us an excellent opportunity to share the first outcomes with our stakeholders and get their feedback. Keep an eye on our Events page and come meet us in June at: