12/07/2011 — IRT participates in three new international research projects

In fall 2011, Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT) commenced its work in three new European research projects. All three projects in the area of “Networked Media Systems” are co-funded by the European Commission under Framework Programme 7. This increases the number of national and international collaborative R&D projects in which IRT is currently involved to 17. The three new projects are:

HBB-NEXT
Under the coordination of Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, HBB-NEXT addresses a next generation of Hybrid Broadcast Broadband solutions building upon successful standards like HbbTV. The project seeks to facilitate the convergence of the broadcasting and Internet worlds by researching user-centric technologies for enriching the TV-viewing experience with aspects of social networking, multiple-device access, group-tailored content recommendations, as well as the seamless and time-synchronous mixing of broadcast content and complementary Internet content. The project results should contribute to an even wider acceptance of HbbTV and will also be a basis for according standard updates. IRT, as one of the nine project partners, acts as scientific coordinator and will lead the information exchange towards standards bodies.
Further information at: http://www.hbb-next.eu

TOSCA-MP
The R&D project TOSCA-MP targets the media production side and its workflows in broadcasting and media houses. The aim is to develop improved tools for content annotation, based on automatic feature extraction of AV media, and search tools for professionals in distributed/networked media production and archiving (television, radio, online). Under the scientific coordination by IRT, the system components will be integrated in a standards-based framework based on the principles of service-oriented architectures.
Further information at: http://www.tosca-mp.eu

ROMEO
The ROMEO project targets the challenges of synchronised live 3D media delivery to groups of users. The concurrency of the media experience will enable users to collaborate and to jointly enjoy multi-view 3D content. This will facilitate application scenarios such as social TV and high quality real-time collaboration. For IRT, the three key aspects in the project are 3D visual attention modelling, hybrid play-out solutions (e.　g. via DVB-T2 and P2P), as well as spatial audio coding and rendering.