Personalised home media centre using semantically enriched TV-anytime content

The paper presents a design and middleware implementation of a personalised home media centre. The proposed system aims to constitute the fundamentals to go beyond existing media centres and electronic programme guides, in the sense of offering a personalised experience for a single and multiple users in a connected home environment. User’s characteristics, preferences and context are used to personalise the user’s experience of viewing and interacting with multimedia content on different heterogeneous devices. The TV-Anytime specification is used as the underlying content and metadata format for handling content from IP, digital broadcast and Blu-ray disc sources. We show how semantics can enrich the TV-Anytime content classification in order to achieve intelligent personalised content search and recommendations.