Research on Fusion of the Web and TV Broadcasting

Despite much talk about the fusion of broadcasting and the Internet, no technology has been established for fusing Web and TV program content. In this paper, we report our research activities of the research on fusion of the Web and TV broadcasting under Kyoto University 21st century Center of Excellence (COE) program entitled Informatics Research Center for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure. We propose several ways to acquire information from diverse information sources of different media types, especially from Web and TV broadcasting. A notable difference between Web contents and TV program contents is that the former is a document-based information media and the latter is a time-based continuous information media, which leads to the difference of information accessing methods. Conventional "Web browsing" is an active manner of accessing information. On the other hand, conventional "TV watching" is a passive way of accessing information. In order to search, integrate and view the information of Web and TV, we explored (I) media conversion between Web and TV contents, (2) watching TV with live chats, (3) dynamic TV-content augmentation by Web, and (4) searching for TV contents with Web