“Streaming Metadata, Applications and Challenges”

Metadata is data about data. Streaming metadata can be embedded in a television transport protocol such as MPEG to enable new types of viewer experiences such as interactive television. SMPTE Working Group W25, Metadata and Wrapper Technology, is defining standards for digital streaming metadata. New standards are needed because without them new forms of data or even existing analog data like closed-captioning (which is standardized in VBI for analog television) is encoded in proprietary ways in otherwise standard digital video streams (such as MPEG-2). — We will explain why metadata is necessary, how it works, and why it is different from conventional databases. We will describe some of the features that make the metadata approach taken by SMPTE more powerful and flexible. We will discuss some lessons learned from creating BigScreen, a Windows software video player that supports metadata.

Published

2001-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00363

ISBN

978-1-61482-934-8