Abstract Multi-channel publishing of interactive multimedia presentations

The ongoing convergence between TV and the Internet leads traditional broadcast companies to publish their content on the Internet. Interactive digital TV platforms, which support rich interactive multimedia applications, are targeted ever more frequently. New consumption platforms of this kind are predominantly built on Internet technologies, yet they have their own specific capabilities and limitations in both a technical and a presentational sense. Publishing interactive multimedia presentations to these platforms poses significant challenges for the generic description of the presentation content, and for the filters that convert these descriptions into final-form presentations. We present a generic publication framework that features a simple data model and a flexible filter architecture. It enables the conversion of a generic input description into presentations targeted at different consumer platforms. As such, it promotes content reuse across platforms, while allowing platform-specific optimizations. The data model and associated file format provide description language independence, essence abstraction and content reuse at a high semantic level. From this model, a structuring format is derived that can contain any presentation description. The architecture of the publication framework is modular and highly extensible, allowing for new input description languages and final-form presentation formats. We demonstrate the infrastructure by an example scenario in which an interactive weather report is being published onto four different platforms (Web, TV, MHP and WAP)