Supporting interaction and audience analysis in interactive TV systems

Despite of the establishment of digital television services, audience measurement and other media analysis still rely on obsolete and usually expensive techniques that date back to the analog era. Moreover, the introduction of interactive services into TV terminal devices is not adequately considered in such market researches. The analysis of both viewer's audience and interactive behavior can thrive this market, which still didn't come up with killer interactive applications. This paper proposes and compares two approaches for the capture of viewer's audience and interactivity behavior in Interactive TV systems (iTV). The first approach for data capturing relies on new extensions to existing iTV middleware standards, whereas the second one just makes use of software features commonly supported by those standards. Captured data should be sent to aggregation servers that allow multiple reports to be generated and made available online for real time tracking. Aggregation servers and software tools are components of the Interaction and Audience Analysis Service Provider (IAASP), which is also described and implemented in this work.