ViSTA-TV will presents its intermediate results at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) – the world’s premier event for professionals in the broadcasting industry. This is a great occasion for ViSTA to showcase its demos to the over 50’000 attendees from over 160 countries.

The project will be presenting under the following heading:

ViSTA-TV: Real-Time TV Audience Behaviour Analytics

The TV industry depends on exact information about viewership behavior. Current methods for collecting this information used by national TV rating agencies rely on specialized set-top boxes. This use of specialized hardware practically limits the number of households sampled and provides a single point of failure (see the technical and legal problems in Switzerland in January). Furthermore, the data is often only available with significant delay.

In the context of ViSTA-TV (Video Stream Analytics for the TV Industry), an EC-funded project, we combined linked open data (LOD) with behavioral information from IPTV. This allows ViSTA-TV to provide highly accurate, real-time and fault-tolerant market research information based on a much larger number of viewers.

At IBC, ViSTA-TV will demonstrate prototype applications enabled by real-time information obtained from live streams of IPTV audience data:

• Broadcaster Dashboard: a dashboard application for broadcasters showing real-time audience statistics, channel switching behavior, analytics, and associated social media activity;
• Heartbeat EPG: a programme guide enabling viewers to see which programmes are currently attracting the greatest attention;
• Infinite Trailers: a next generation channel surfing application equipped with basic remote control functionality that helps gathering audience statistics.