Surveys show that, although around 80% of people are using a second device (phone, tablet or laptop) when watching TV only 20% of them are engaging with ‘companion content’.The 2-IMMERSE project will innovate around the delivery of experiences that are created to be multi-screen in production yet delivered to be flexible across single and multiple-screens and responsive to the preferences of individual audience members. We will build and trial services that deliver multi-screen experiences of high value content including theatre, Grand Prix motorcycle racing and live professional football in the home, in school and in public venues. The resulting delivery platform will be open to extension by third parties enabling new genres of multi-screen experiences to be created for content beyond sport and Drama. New multi-screen services will merge content from broadcast and broadband sources and support new visualisations, viewpoints, data and replay facilities in addition to social network functionality such as chatting, commenting, polling The goal of 2-IMMERSE is to allow TV service providers to break free from the constraints of rendering a broadcast stream onto a single 16x9 frame and to develop compelling experiences that combine synchronised, interactive and customisable content service applications to provide individual and shared content customized to the number and type of screens available and the preferences of the audience. In doing so our aim is to open up to audiences capabilities for configuration and control only available currently to producers and presenters (e.g. “show replay again here, keep the leaderboard on this tablet and the view of the crowd on that second wall screen”).

The project will deliver MPAT – an extensible platform for the simple creation of interactive multi-media applications. In recent years the convergence of TV and online media has been increasing with dramatic pace. The boundaries between TV and personal media are dissolving rapidly. HbbTV is a key driver in this; enabling media companies to deploy interactive services for TV to a wide audience by building on top of a single standard. In many European markets, over 90% of Connected TVs, sold today, are HbbTV-enabled. Features including catch-up TV and interactive advertisements have already proved to be a great success because of their accessibility to the consumer and integration with the TV. Another recent milestone was the publication of HbbTV release 2.0, moving to state-of-the-art HTML5 and offering built in support for bi-directional multi-screen services as well as media and application synchronisation. Developing HbbTV applications from scratch requires considerable resources and for this reason they are often simply too costly for single formats or shows to contemplate. MPAT is the solution; motivated by a WordPress-like technical and business approach, MPAT makes application development affordable and sustainable while creating a new eco-system for content creators, theme and plug-in developers alike. With MPAT, media companies can semi-automatically author their set of customised applications that are then populated with content by the editorial staff or by linking MPAT to existing content management solutions. The open-source MPAT core will provide all the essential features to create compelling multi-screen experiences for HbbTV and other HTML5-based devices. The Consortium comprises key stakeholders from the HbbTV and media domain who will jointly deliver a sound and close-to-market solution thoroughly validated through an exhaustive set of pilots.

5G solutions for verticals is a well-defined European objective. This requires developing 5G infrastructures to address a wide range of applications adopting flexible architectures, offering converged services across heterogeneous technology domains with unified software control. However, vertical industries today can only verify use cases in small scales in commercial environments, before investing in large scale deployments. Through ICT-17 projects 5G infrastructures become available to verticals to test their applications, however large-scale trials are still not possible. 5G-VICTORI will conduct large scale trials for advanced vertical use case verification focusing on Transportation, Energy, Media and Factories of the Future and cross-vertical use cases. It leverages 5G network technologies developed in 5G-PPP Phase-1 and Phase-2 projects 5G-XHaul and 5G-PICTURE and exploits extensively existing facilities interconnecting main sites of all ICT-17 infrastructures i.e. 5G-VINNI, 5GENESIS and 5G-EVE and the 5G UK test-bed in a Pan-European Infrastructure. The project will provide enhancements of existing infrastructures towards integration of a large variety of vertical and cross-vertical use cases. 5G-VICTORI’s platform aims to transform current closed, purposely developed and dedicated infrastructures into open environments where resources and functions are exposed to ICT and vertical industries through common vertical and non-vertical specific repositories. These functions can be accessed shared on demand and deployed to compose very diverse set of services in a large variety of ecosystems. 5G-VICTORI’s uniquely strong consortium brings together major players form ICT including operators, equipment vendors academic and research organisation and SMEs as well as main players from vertical industries including nationwide rail and electricity operators, rail technology vendors, media content delivery players and a number of SMEs focusing on advanced vertical services.