In this paper, we present prototype interactive TV software that incorporates visual content analysis tools and social networking in the home TV. We present the challenges of working with the living room TV environment and outline how we have utilized visual processing and search technologies to address these challenges and create a novel prototype interactive TV system.

In this paper we describe how content-based analysis techniques can be used to provide much greater functionality to the users of an interactive TV (iTV) device. We describe several content-based multimedia analysis techniques and how some of these can be exploited in the iTV domain, resulting in the provision of a set of powerful functions for iTV users. To validate our ideas, we introduce an iTV application we developed which incorporates some of these techniques into a simple set of user features, in order to demonstrate the usefulness of content-based techniques for iTV. The contribution of this paper is not to provide an in-depth discussion on each of the individual content-based techniques, but rather to show how many of these powerful technologies can be incorporated into an interactive TV system.