A Proposal of an Interactive Broadcasting System for Audience-driven Live TV on the Internet

Abstract

Traditional video services on the Internet are of a broadcasting service nature such as streaming and video-on-demand (VoD). Recent services incorporate more of the interactive nature of network applications such as easy video sharing and those with a chat function. Meanwhile, we have been conducting experimental Internet broadcasting in practice and found it difficult for non-professional broadcasters to provide audiences with satisfactory contents since they do not have a large budget or the technical knowledge to produce broadcasting contents compared to the professional ones. In this paper, we propose an audience-driven broadcast service model in which audiences can send their wish to a broadcaster such that they would like to see some specific objects while broadcasting; the broadcaster can reply back to the request as well. We implemented a prototype system for audience-driven live broadcasting and studied its effects and problems based on the results from the experimental broadcast at our university graduation ceremony and our campus festival. This paper reports our experiments and findings of the audience-driven live broadcasting.