Metadata-based user interface design for enhanced content access and viewing

Abstract

The nature of viewing is changing due to the huge volumes of content being produced including user content generated by amateurs and the proliferation of personalized services. The type of content being produced is not only for entertainment (movies/TV) purposes, but also can be instructional and directive (classroom, documentary and adult content). This leads to a type of viewing that is non-linear and requires increased random access into the content to be viewed effectively. Those who produce the content (or aggregate a number of existing ones) may not necessarily index it sufficiently for a variety of reasons. In-advance indexing would not work anyway in case the indexing used time-varying factors such as popularity, viewing frequency or duration. In this demo, we tackle this problem and present a new seekbar design for the dash.js player that allows the users to navigate the content more effectively and find the points of interest within the content faster. This new seekbar uses auxiliary metadata to show informative icons or color the parts of the media timeline differently to inform the users.