Future Personalised Media Experiences

Vision and ambition

Personalisation of media experiences for individual is vital for audience engagement of young and old, allowing more meaningful encounters tailored to their interest, making them part of the story, and increasing accessibility. The goal of the Prosperity Partnership is to realise a transformation to future personalised content creation and delivery at scale for the public at home or on the move.

The Prosperity Partnership will position the UK at the forefront of ‘Personalised Media’ revolution enabling the creation and delivery of new services, and positioning the UK creative industry to lead future personalised media creation and intelligent network distribution to render personalised experiences for everyone, anywhere. Leading this advance beyond streaming media to personalisation, interaction and immersion is critical for the future of the the UK creative industry opening new horizontal markets.

Evolution of mass-media audio-visual ‘broadcast’ content has moved increasingly towards Internet delivery, which creates exciting potential for hyper-personalised media experiences delivered at scale to mass audiences

Realisation of personalised experiences at scale presents three fundamental research challenges:

  • Capture: Transformation of video to audio-visual objects –> Audio-Visual AI
  • Production: Creation of personalised experiences –> AI for creative tools
  • Delivery: Intelligent use of network resource for mass audiences –> AI for Networks

The Prosperity Partnership will address these major technical and creative challenges to delivering user-centred personalised audience experiences at scale.

Advances in audio-visual AI for machine understanding of captured content will enable the automatic transformation of captured 2D video streams to an object-based media (OBM) representation. OBM will allow adaptation for efficient production, delivery and personalisation of the media experience whilst maintaining the perceived quality of the captured video content

To deliver personalised experiences to audiences of millions requires transformation of media processing and distribution architectures into a hybrid and distributed low-latency computation platform to allow flexible deployment of OBM and compute-intensive tasks across the network. This will achieve efficiency in terms of cost and energy use, while providing optimal quality of experience for the audience within the constraints of the system.

Research approach

Research addressing the major challenges for personalised media will contribute fundamental scientific and technological advances in three key areas:

  • Audio-visual AI for real-time understanding of general real-world dynamic scenes;
  • Personalised Experiences at Scale: intelligent user-centred media personalisation for enhanced QoE.
  • Intelligent Network compute: software defined networks for efficient utilisation of network compute and delivery resources at scale.

The Prosperity Partnership takes a holistic approach centred on the users personalised media experience to inform the technical advances across five interlinked research streams:

  • Stream 1: Personalised Media Experiences
  • Stream 2: Object-based capture and representation of live events 
  • Stream 3: Intelligent Object-based Production of Personalised Experiences
  • Stream 4: Intelligent Network Delivery of Personalised Experiences at Scale
  • Stream 5: Business Impact

Use Cases

The Prosperity Partnership will deploy a series of use cases to drive research and demonstrate the potential of personalised media. Examples include:

News and Documentaries

  • News tailored to the individual maintaining integrity
  • Interest, location, activity, device, language, time
  • Personalisation to dynamically adapt content
  • Intelligently prioritise information to user requirements

Drama

  • Enhanced storytelling experiences
  • Adapt to accessibility requirements and device
  • Enhance audio/visual based on narrative importance i.e. intelligibility of speech according to hearing

Live Events: Sports and Music

  • Sense of ‘being there’ at a live event
  • Personalised immersive content
  • User-centred rendering of spatial sound and vision
  • Shared experiences with friends and family

Education

  • Personalisation to individual learning style and pace
  • Improved education in the classroom and at home
  • Interactive educational experiences that adapt to interest and level of understanding

Games

  • Personalised to individual viewpoint and interaction
  • Interactive storytelling
  • Potential to adapt to individual interest, activity etc.