Personalized Web-Based Contents, Generated Through a Cross-Media Environment, as Additional Information to Documentary Videos

Due to their characteristics and capability to support a diversity of contexts of use through flexible solutions, cross-media environments have been gaining space with iTV being an obligatory part of these environments due to its characteristics. This paper briefly addresses the design challenges that need to be considered in the design of cross-media environments capable of generating personalized web-based contents as additional information to video, from different devices. The system designed to illustrate our research, and which evolved from previous versions, is called eiTV and generates a cross-media personalized web-based content, which provides extra information about users’ selected topics of interest while watching a specific video from a documentary genre. The web-based content may be generated, accessed, personalized, shared, enriched and (immediately or later) viewed through iTV, PC and mobile phone depending on the users’ needs. This paper main focus is on the ‘Create functionality’ wich includes the interfaces designed to generate the web content, and the ‘Chat functionality’ designed to support users comunication needs while watching videos, and enrich the web content. An evaluation, with the participation of 30 elements, from 16 to 52 years old, was carried out with high fidelity prototypes and the achieved results were very optimistic.