pv is a system which brings personalized flexibility to the content and duration of video, as it is presented, in real-time. pv allows each user to enjoy a unique viewing experience, to freely explore the structure of the content, and to create and share new ways to view and explore content.
pv breaks from the linearity of video and film with two enabling features: video has metadata that describes the content, and the final video mixing / compositing / rendering is delegated to the viewing device.
This metadata provides a kind of map to the video content: it can describe where the plot points are, where violence, nudity, locations, characters, titles, dialog, and other elements are. Some can be measured, such as the level of violence. Others, like dialog, can be text annotations. Others we can link together to form a narrative that can be interactively explored.
Users can tailor their experience by selecting how pv uses the metadata - should it skip over violence? Should it focus only on plot points for a brief overview of the story? The controls for doing this are incredibly simple and intuitive. With a viewing history for individual users, their tastes can be accomodated automatically and fine tuned over time, constructed for various age groups and audiences, even changed on the fly.
pv is video in the age of personalization.
Examples:
a unique viewing experience
- fit a video into an arbitrary duration by skipping uninteresting details
- explore the progression of a single character
- skip inappropriate moments
- expand some segments for more details, contract others to skim through more quickly
freely explore the structure of the content
- view a high level map of the content: eg location and duration of violence, when characters appear
- review highlights involving: certain characters, plot points, storylines, events, places, …
- jump through related segments of video in a documentary
- measure and compare: how violent? how much nudity?
create and share new ways to view and explore the content:
- add new annotations, tags, metrics for a video
- remix, reorder movies
- share this metadata with other users
Whole system examples
- boilerplate video (eg episode title sequences) can be stored/cached separately
- data overlays (scrolling links, etc) can be rendered on the viewing device
- User restrictions and access levels to a video library: users define "(un)interesting" and "(in)appropriate" as used above
All of these also apply to groupings of related videos (a movie and its sequels, episodes), as well as an entire video library.
status: prototype is in development as of April 2010.
Questions?
contact Russell Holt: rsl@russellholt.com
contact Russell Holt