Sports fans should be in for a treat next summer when Austrian public service broadcaster ORF debuts a new technology that will dynamically deliver a wealth of video, statistics and other information to fans for the Euro 2008 football championships. “We want to make the viewing experience more pleasurable and provide a better service for customers,” said Carmen Mac Williams, media researcher at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, writes Ken Kerschbaumer.
The system will allow viewers to access multiple story streams that are created in realtime and will change based on the interests of viewers. Thanks to digital set-top boxes the viewer will be able to access interactive content like statistics and athlete profiles while ORF will receive instantaneous feedback and audience measurement to better meet viewer needs.
The production support system hooks into the ORF infrastructure and will rely on Thomson K2 servers and Bluefish 4:4:4 cards to automate the gathering of metadata. Williams says the team in the control room will then use that metadata to access content from a deeper archive as well as statistics and other data.
The system is currently undergoing a 2000 home trial and is expected to be used during primetime broadcasts of Euro 2008.
