Position Paper: Challenges for enabling targeted multi-screen advertisement for interactive TV services

The Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS Competence Center Future Applications and Media FAME researches and develops in the fields of interactive smart and social media services, cross-platform applications as well as personalized service offerings. All technical solutions comply with applicable international standards, such as DASH IF, the Open IPTV Forum, HbbTV and W3C. In this context, the theme of the FAME organized 4th FOKUS Media Web Symposium on May 8 9, 2014 is ”Internet delivered Media and Multi-screen Technologies and Standards”. In this position paper we will address the challenges and missing standards for enabling targeted multi-screen advertisement for interactive TV services. Furthermore, we will outline and discuss the limitations and difficulties of building cross-platform and multi-screen TV services. We will also propose potential solutions for closing the gap between the web and TV domains based on the following use case: Alice and Bob are watching a Formula 1 race on the TV. The broadcaster offers a service which allows users watch the race from different camera perspectives, where the TV displays the perspective of the main camera and a companion device may be used to display the perspective of the on-board camera of a selected driver (user can select which driver). During commercial breaks, the broadcast stream on the TV shows advertisements for a certain brand of footwear. At same time, the on-board camera stream will be interrupted on each companion device and a companion app related to the advertisement displayed on the TV will be launched. Alice and Bob retrieve personalized advertisements, in this case Alice’s companion app displays women’s shoes and Bob’s companion app men’s shoes. Through this app the user can for example chose to bookmark products displayed in the commercial break that he is interested in buying later and may even get a discount. After the commercial break ends, the main perspective of the Formula 1 race continues on the TV and the on-board camera perspective on the companion devices. The rest of this paper is structured as following: Section 1 deals with the application layer of connected TV and introduces best practices for the development of TV applications. Section 2 addresses the multi-screen aspect and the missing APIs for connecting companion devices to TV. Section 3 looks at W3C media extensions which provide functionalities for interoperable adaptive streaming and content protection.