The arrival of immersive head-mounted displays to the consumer market will create a demand for immersive content of over 2 Billion euros in 2016. However, current audiovisual content is ill-suited for Immersive displays. For example, cuts between shots, which constitute the very basic fabric of traditional cinematic language, do not work well in immersive displays. ImmersiaTV will create a novel form of broadcast omnidirectional video content production and delivery that offers end-users a coherent audiovisual experience across head mounted displays, second screens and the traditional TV set, instead of having their attention divided across them. This novel kind of content will seamlessly integrate with and further augment traditional TV and second display consumer habits. ImmersiaTV will assemble an end-to-end toolset covering the entire audiovisual value chain: immersive production tools, support for omnidirectional cameras, including ultra-high definition and high dynamic range images, and adaptive content coding and delivery, and demonstrate it through 3 pilot demonstrations addressing both on-demand and live content delivery.

HRADIO (Hybrid Radio everywhere for everyone) focuses on radio service innovations enabled by convergence. While radio, with its rich editorial content, remains a highly popular medium, listening figures are slowly declining, particularly among youngsters. With the rapid rise of smartphones, radio faces competition from many new services including music steaming platforms. Regular radio today often does not include attractive features as known from vertical platforms. And if present, they are mostly not well integrated with the actual radio programme. This is where HRADIO will deliver. Driven by the industry need to create attractive new radio experiences, the project will leverage the full potential of hybrid technology for radio – enabling the integration of cost-effective broadcast distribution with new online features. Broadcasters will be enabled to personalise radio services (while respecting privacy), to provide intuitive functionalities like time-shifting and, eventually, to foster and to exploit user engagement. HRADIO will pave the way to bring these features not only to broadcasters’ native mobile applications, but also to portals, to connected radios and into the car. The core approach is to integrate validated solutions and to harmonise APIs which together will provide broadcasters with an abstracted service layer accessible across any device and distribution platform – ensuring sustainability and return of investment. Therefore, consumers will be able to access their personal radio services on different devices and platforms enabled by a seamless broadcast-internet integration for radio content distribution. All features will be tested in 3 phases of large-scale pilots involving broadcasters, app developers for mobile and automotive devices. Eventually, HRADIO will publish its developments as ready-to-use Android and HTML client implementations including an extensive set of well documented APIs fostering new service developments for the radio sector.

Improving the accessibility of content for the Deaf community is an important goal for both EU governments and broadcast industry regulators. Although legislation is being used to coerce content producers and broadcasters to do so, the cost of producing sign-language content and the negative impact of having a sign-interpreter appearing on the content for hearing individuals has relegated sign-language programming to late nights or a small number of sign-presented programs. A low-cost solution for personalized sign-interpreted content creation can address both of these problems, leading to greater accessibility to media content for Deaf users. CONTENT4ALL proposes such a solution to the problem in the short-term, which is also commericalizable, and proposes innovations to technologies that can lead to automated sign-translation capabilities in long-term. To this end, it builds upon the technologies demonstrated by the consortium partners in previous EU projects. As a first development a remote signing apparatus (located off-premises of the broadcaster) will be produced to capture a human sign-interpreter’s signs, pose and facial expressions and to parameterize this information. Then, it will be rendered photo-realistically as a 3D representation of the human sign-interpreter at the broadcaster for production of the personalized stream for Deaf users. While this solution can be used commercially, resulting datasets will provide a vast source of information for learning how to parameterize sign information for translation purposes. The second development of CONTENT4ALL will focus on advancing the algorithms/models used to do so, with the intent to create an open dataset for further research into automated signing. Finally, CONTENT4ALL will demonstrate automated sign-translation applied to a real-world TV broadcasting scenario, which is envisaged to lead to new approaches and innovations in the area in the long-run.