A different way of watching

The cliche that children are better than their parents at programming a video recorder was never more than half true. The user interface of most recorders is risible and only youngsters can be bothered with it, just as it was they who started the texting boom using the equally unsuitable numerical keypad.

Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) are at last making TV recording as easy as it should be, a matter of simply clicking a listing. But, coupled to computers or PVRs, they mean we can view TV more like we read a book - in chunks and to our own schedule and we can do it on a laptop, a PC or a portable media player. There are even pilot TV broadcasts to handheld PDAs. It's the death of the couch potato, passively taking in anything the TV throws out.

The industry saw much of this coming, and began thinking (or panicking in some cases) about how it should affect content and delivery. One result was a project called TV Anytime (TVA), involving the BBC and other broadcasters across the world, content providers such as Disney and recording rights organisations.

This has produced an XML-based TVA specification for programme metadata, which may not sound very exciting but it could transform our use of television and steer us towards new forms of multimedia communication.

TV metadata, at its simplest, can help you to classify or search for a programme by genre or subgenre. You could tell your PVR to record anything from the Olympics, say; or just every hockey event. Metadata also allows you to impose a structure, so that instead of viewing a recording linearly as transmitted, you can take it in book-like chapters.

Kingswood Warren engineers Andrew McParland and Chris Newell took me through a TVA-enabled recording of Walking With Beasts that allowed it to be spilt into chapters, or segmented according to the animal featured.

The metadata, which would be transmitted with the programme, also included hyperlinked text that can be wrapped round still and moving images.

If and when screens become as pleasant to read as paper, this could lead to a form of multimedia 'book' that exploits the different strengths of text, audio and video. For now, as McParland puts it, the purpose is to provide an open standard that allows people to do interesting things with TV. The content or service provider provides the metadata but it may be exploited in different ways by various devices or applications.

Programmes and their searchable metadata are associated with a 'Crid' (content resource ID) that can be used to trace several alternative locations or broadcast times. This means, for instance, that if you searched a TVA-enabled elisting for a programme that had already been broadcast, you might be given a choice of a repeat time or a web location where the recording is available on demand - see here

The idea that PVRs will be the death of TV advertising has been turned on its head, McParland said. 'Rather than seeing the forward button as the biggest threat, [advertisers] are seeing the pause button as the biggest opportunity.'

The TVA system would allow people to ask to see a longer version of an ad they are interested in, or to be taken to a website. You could also see it being used for product placements: see famous beauty in new outfit, click here to see where you can buy the same.

TVA has been submitted to the standards body ETSI, and the DVB organisation is drawing up a spec on how it should it be carried on European digital TV signals. The rest of the world, including countries using different TV formats, is likely to use it too.

Newell points out that the metadata could make video, usually near impossible to index, more easily searchable than the web.

'The reason that search engines are not as good as you'd like them to be is that there is no equivalent system on the web. Not universally, anyway. But for television we have done it in a very detailed way.'

This assumes, of course, that TV companies are willing to put the resources into compiling the metadata. But much of the information is put on file anyway in some way or another during programme production, and it could be collected automatically if the process is standardised in a management system.

It may pay companies to do so. Audiences per broadcast are falling, but recorded programmes have an afterlife from which new revenues may be derived - for instance from ads that update themselves when screened. McParland said: 'TV Anytime is enabling new business models.'

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