EuroITV2009 conference

Normally Putting People First doesn’t promote conferences, but this is one organised by a good colleague, held at the Belgian university town where I studied, and on a topic that we at Experientia are professionally quite heavily involved with. So here is the announcement, to be seen as an exception to the rule:

EuroITV2009 – “Networked Television”
7th European Interactive TV Conference
June 3rd to 5th 2009
Leuven, Belgium

EuroITV2009 is a forum for professionals not only from Europe, but from all over the world who are interested in, work with and do research on all aspects of interactive television. The conference will be held in the lively university town of Leuven, Belgium on 3, 4 and 5 June 2009.

The theme of the 7th European Interactive TV Conference is ‘Networked Television’. Interactive television is becoming one piece in a bigger puzzle of different interconnected devices. This not only has technical implications, but also impacts users and television viewers.

Viewers use their cell phones to send text messages to broadcasters, they use their PC to download movies that can then be watched on the big television screen, social networks are including TV content and iTV is including social network features, secondary screens can be used to control the content on television, etc. Instead of an age of device convergence, we see that in practice we’re heading towards device divergence.

The conference will look at how we should shift our focus from looking at iTV as a system that functions on itself, to iTV as part of a bigger set of networked devices and explore how this impacts users as well as technologies.

A call for papers (pdf) has just been issued. Papers are solicited from, but not limited to the following topics:
– Beyond the home context, extended home, Mobile TV
– Ambient intelligence, ambient media environments
– Social TV, sociability, usability and user experience
– Digital content production, HDTV and digital cinema
– Asset management, metadata and content enrichment
– Entertainment computing, games, betting, game shows
– Broadband, IPTV, 3DTV and VR systems
– Audience research, television studies, ethnography, user studies
– New advertising and revenue models for television
– Accessibility, universal access, multimodal interaction
– Business models, media management, media economics, t-commerce, t-learning
– Web2.0, social media, community television, user-generated content
– Communication services, video conferencing, messaging
– Content management, digital rights management
– Interactive storytelling, interactive advertising
– Electronic program guide, video search, video navigation
– Enhanced TV (news, weather, sports)
– Changes in technical requirements and infrastructures (ubiquitous and mobile)
– Standards (TV-Anytime, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, SMIL)
– Multimedia, graphics, broadcast and video technology
– Personalization, user modeling, intelligent user interfaces
– Ethical, regulatory and policy issues
– Everyday life practices by family, elderly, youngsters and children
– Digital divide and e-inclusion issues
– Methods for digital television research and design