Second screen user experience: A new digital television frontier

Abstract

Availability and increased hardware performance of handheld devices with high resolution screens encourage users to exploit them as the second screen while watching television. Second screen is a term that refers to an additional screen of a handheld device such as a tablet or a smart phone, with an operating system capable of running desired installed applications. Desire to make additional DTV information available to the user which can be presented on the second screen tends to push the limit of digital television in that direction. This paper presents a framework to distribute and present both premium and free-to-air television content. The framework is based on server/client architecture and includes: TV remote control, streaming of television services, additional content (Electronic Program Guide, reminders...), data protection of streamed services to client devices. The system architecture consists of a media server and its clients. Media server is a Set-Top box with Android OS. Main duty of media server is to receive and process DTV content received from broadcasters and distribute the content to clients (second screen devices). Client application is developed on various OS/Platforms: Android and iOS. Multimedia content can be streamed using supported protocols: HTTP, RTP/RTSP, and adaptive streaming protocols (HLS and MPEG-DASH). Streamed content is protected using DTCP-IP. The main objective of the paper is to describe the utilization of before mentioned standards in a framework to use the DTV data and functions beyond the scope of the main TV screen. The client application also implements the remote controller GUI in order to use one device to control the TV.