Live Television in a Digital Library

Abstract

Nowadays nearly everyone has access to digital television with a growing number of channels available for free. However due to the nature of broadcasting, this huge mass of information that reaches us is not, for the main part, organised—it is principally a succession of images and sound transmitted in a flow of data. Compare this with digital libraries which are powerful at organising a large but fixed set of documents. This project brings together these two concepts by concurrently capturing all the available live television channels, and segments them into files which are then imported into a digital video library. The system leverages off the information contained in the electronic program guide and the video recordings to generate metadata suitable for the digital library. By combining these two concepts together this way, the aim of this work is to look beyond what is currently available in the digital TV set top boxes on the market today and explore the full potential—unencumbered by commercial market constraints—to what the raw technology can provide.