Producing Personalised Object-Based Audio-Visual Experiences: an Ethnographic Study

Developments in object-based media and IP-based delivery offer an opportunity to create superior audience experiences through personalisation. Towards the aim of making personalised experiences regularly available across the breadth of audio-visual media, we conducted a study to understand how personalised experiences are being created. This consisted of interviews with producers of six representative case studies, followed by a thematic analysis. We describe the workflows and report on the producers’ experiences and obstacles faced. We found that the metadata models, enabling personalisation, were developed independently for each experience, restricting interoperability of personalisation affordances provided to users. Furthermore, the available tools were not effectively integrated into preferred workflows, substantially increasing role responsibilities and production time. To ameliorate these issues, we propose the development of a unifying metadata framework and novel production tools. These tools should be integrated into existing workflows; improve efficiency using AI; and enable producers to serve more diverse audiences.