GeoHbbTV: A framework for the development and evaluation of geographic interactive TV contents

Synchronizing TV contents with applications is a topic that has gained much interest during the last years. Reaching the viewers through various channels (TV, web, mobile devices, etc.) has shown to be a means for increasing the audience. Related to the above, the hybrid TV standard HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) synchronizes the broadcast of video and audio with applications that may be delivered through either the broadcast channel or a broadband network. Thus, HbbTV applications may be developed to provide contextual information for emitted TV shows and advertisements. This paper reports on the integration of the automatic generation of geographic focus of text content with interactive TV. In particular it describes a framework for the incorporation of geographic context to TV shows and its visualization through HbbTV. To achieve this, geographic named entities are first extracted from the available subtitles and next the spatial extension of those entities is used for the production of context maps. An evaluation strategy has been devised and used to test alternative prototype implementations for TV newscast in Spanish language. Finally, to go beyond the initial solution proposed, some challenges for future research are also discussed.