Re: The Web and Journalism

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. On these "future of news" and "future of television" topics, I am pleased to share some new ideas with respect to "channels 2.0". These ideas are in the postscript.

Any ideas, comments, questions, or other feedback are welcomed!


Best regards,
Adam

P.S.:

Introduction

Channels, in particular digital channels, can be much more than just video containers. In these regards, I am pleased to share some preliminary ideas and brainstorming towards channels 2.0.

Channels 2.0
Channel Descriptions

Channels could provide channel descriptions utilizing an extensible standard format (e.g., XML or JSON) to describe their features and capabilities to smart televisions and other devices, these resources referring to one or more real-time video containers.

Multimedia

Channel descriptions could reference a number of images and video clips, e.g., logos, at various resolutions and pixel densities.

Homepages

Channels could each have a homepage. As for whether these pages would be fully-customizable HTML pages or templated pages with image or video backgrounds and positioned text remains to be determined.

Customers could navigate to subpages about the particular content that they were watching from a channel's homepage. Similarly, these subpages would be either fully-customizable HTML pages or templated pages with image or video backgrounds and positioned text.

Channel Menus

Channels could each have a main menu. This menu could be available on a channel's homepage and made available while watching the channel, e.g., by pressing the up arrow.

Settings and Configurations

Channels could each provide settings and configuration for customers.

Similarly, individual (interactive) shows could have settings and configurations.

Sub-channels

Channels could have multiple sub-channels inside of them. There could be different types of sub-channels. Sub-channels could have attributes. Some sub-channels could be statically available while others might be dynamically available, or available only for a time.

For each channel, one sub-channel could have an attribute indicating it to be the main, selected, or default sub-channel. These sub-channels would be the video content displayed when customers utilized the traditional channel browsing technique with channel-up and channel-down buttons.

Grid-based Navigational Guides

Some subchannels would have attributes indicating them as being visible and as having scheduled content. Channels with one or more of these sub-channels could provide grid-based navigational guides for browsing them.

This guide could be navigated to from a channel's homepage. This guide could be accessed via a channel's main menu.

Smart televisions' grid-based navigational guides for viewing the content scheduled on multiple channels could version to be tree-based, each channel having a main, selected, or default sub-channel of content while also being expandable to reveal sub-channels, each of these similarly having a description and, perhaps, scheduled content.

User Feedback

Channels could provide elegant user experiences for customers to provide feedback pertaining to content.

Personalization

Channels could offer semi-personalized content, possibly via a special sub-channel. In this way, customers could receive recommended, personalized contents.

Content providers could interrupt personalized content to provide other content, e.g., breaking news content, intended for entire audiences.

Internationalization

Channels could provide content in multiple languages. Translations could involve video, e.g., digital lip sync, in addition to audio.

Interactive Video

Channels could provide customers with interactivity with respect to their content and advertisements.

See also: WICG/proposals#33<https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/33> .

Multi-device Interoperability

Channels could support multi-device interoperability.

Today, customers can use their mobile devices to scan on-screen QR codes. In the near-future, customers might be able to use a remote control to click on a hyperlink or hotspot to send content to or otherwise navigate to content on their mobile device.

Legacy Channels

Default behaviors with respect to new features and capabilities such as homepages, menus, and settings and configuration would need to be specified for legacy channels. In theory, channel descriptions (i.e., XML or JSON resources) could be automatically generated for legacy channels.

Use Cases and Scenarios
Artificial Intelligence

Multimodal dialogue systems could be implemented via interactive live-streaming video channels or via stored and persisted such content, e.g., files.

Children's Entertainment

Children's entertainment, e.g., Sesame Street<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street> and Blue's Clues<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%27s_Clues>, often presents audiences with opportunities for thinking, reflection, and learning. Shows' formats could be enhanced, e.g., with "games", utilizing the advancements to technology under discussion.

Education and Training

With new features and capabilities, in particular interactivity, educational television content for learners of all ages could be enhanced, e.g., including questions, quizzes, and exams within or between segments of instructional content.

Adaptive educational content, content varying based on learners' responses, can be provided via these technologies.

Government Transparency

With sub-channels, more government events, hearings, and proceedings, e.g., local, state, and federal, could be provided for audiences on public-interest channels.

In the United States, C-SPAN<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN> focuses primarily on the federal government, providing three simultaneous channels of content. C-SPAN focuses on the House of Representatives, C-SPAN 2 on the Senate, and C-SPAN 3 on various other government events, hearings, and proceedings.

With location-based personalization, those sub-channels most relevant to individual customers could be presented for their browsing, navigation, and consumption, e.g., content relevant to their cities, counties, states, and federal governments.

In the near future, local, state, and federal public meetings could be simulcast on enhanced digital television alongside Web-based video live-streaming, storage, and search services and solutions.

Music

With respect to music video scenarios, different kinds of music could be each be streamed simultaneously via sub-channels. Presently, a separate channel is required for each kind of music from a content provider.

News

Via channel-specific homepages, main menus, or via browsing sub-channels’ contents using grid-based navigational guides, customers would be able to check their local weather forecasts at any point in time while remaining on a news channel.

A channel’s sub-channels could be differing kinds of news content, e.g., weather, national, world, local, business, technology, entertainment, sports, science, health. There could also be a default "combination" sub-channel which would be understood as selecting and blending together segments of content from other specialized sub-channels.

Sports

With these new features, e.g., sub-channels, new possibilities for sports entertainment include, but are not limited to, customers being able to select from available camera angles and to browse replays.

Surveys and Opinion Polls

Surveys and opinion polls could be conducted using interactive video.

Implementation Discussion

Some preliminary implementation ideas are offered for discussion purposes.

Channels, Containers and Tracks

Each channel would be described by a channel description. A channel description would be a resource (e.g., XML or JSON) for describing its features and capabilities, referencing pertinent multimedia content such as images and video clips, describing its homepage, describing its channel menu, and indicating its (dynamic) set of containers.

Each container would be described by attributes and metadata.

Each container would contain a (dynamic) number of tracks. These tracks could be of kinds including audio, video, text, and data.

Hyperlinks or Hotspots

Each container could contain a track designated as being for hyperlinks or hotspots. Images or video clips could be provided in another track, these having the same width and height as their intended hyperlinks or hotspots, to be displayed while hyperlinks, hotspots, or menu items were displayed and/or hovered over.

Each hyperlink or hotspot would occur both spatially and temporally, e.g., in a rectangular screen region and available for a duration.

Hyperlinks or hotspots could:

  1.  open and add a container to the channel,
  2.  close and remove a container from the channel,
  3.  pause, resume, rewind, or fast-forward a container in the channel, if it provides seeking capabilities,
  4.  navigate the playback device to a container in the channel,
  5.  signal a user's intent to open or navigate to other (Web) content, on another device, e.g., a connected mobile device,
  6.  store a value to a new or existing setting, configuration, or data variable,
  7.  ping a service provider,
  8.  perform multiple actions simultaneously.

Menus

A menu can be considered to be a mutually exclusive set of hyperlinks or hotspots with (optionally or required) a default option in the event that a specified duration of time elapsed. As menus can be implemented with video content and overlayed hyperlinks or hotspots, the above capabilities may suffice to provide a number of key scenarios.

Towards providing accessibility features for hyperlinks, hotspots, and menus, menu items could have identifiers (e.g., option-1, option-2, option-3, and so forth), these being unique per menu, and, using these identifiers, menu items could be labeled and described by text content in tracks for purposes including hover-over effects and accessibility.

Hidden Hyperlinks or Hotspots

Other important elements to consider are hidden hyperlinks or hotspots. These would function in some of the ways that visible hyperlinks or hotspots, intended for customer interaction, could but would function in a seamless manner and invisibly to customers.

Hidden hyperlinks or hotspots would have an additional capability:

  1.  perform one or more actions conditionally, based upon the value of a setting, configuration, or data variable.

Hidden hyperlinks or hotspots would, then, be able to conditionally branch playback depending upon the values of devices', channels', or shows' settings, configurations, or data variables. Hidden hyperlinks or hotspots could be implemented with tracks in containers, e.g., those same tracks designated as being for visible hyperlinks and hotspots.

By adding the capabilities for hidden hyperlinks or hotspots to be able to conditionally act, e.g., branch, based on the availability and readiness of channels' containers, interactive content could prefetch content and also display content while awaiting other content. Prefetching is one technique for ensuring the seamless and smooth playback of interactive video content.

Time and Timers

Visible and hidden hyperlinks or hotspots could open, start, pause, resume, reset, and close named timers, these being special types of named variables. Alternatively, a more expressive syntax for conditional expressions could be considered and a keyword provided for referencing the current time, e.g., with millisecond resolution. This special keyword could have its value assigned to variables and also have variables' values subtracted from it in conditional expressions.

Conclusion

Thank you. I am looking forward to discussing these or any other ideas towards advancing the concepts of channels.


________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2024 9:12 AM
To: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: The Web and Journalism

Civic Technology Community Group,

Also, with respect to the "future of news", (civic) technology, and journalism, "in many of the countries covered in our survey, we find [...] low levels of trust, declining engagement, and an uncertain business environment" [9]. Declining engagement can, in part, explain CNN+ [10] which was, in my opinion, technologically, a step in the right direction. In spite of CNN+, I remain optimistic about interactive video technologies as pertaining to news and journalistic documentaries. BBC is researching interactive media technologies [11][12].

One can imagine applications of various new and emerging technologies, including and beyond content menus systems and UX as seen on Netflix and others. Perhaps some enhancements and new features to request for services like YouTube News could be brainstormed here. There are also benefits and caveats to consider with respect to personalized sequences of news segments using recommender systems. In addition to using remote controls to select video sources, as seen on Netflix and others, remote controls could be used to provide types of feedback which can also inform algorithms recommending sequences of video segments. Atop these personalized sequences of segments, one can imagine the capability for news providers to interrupt, to show entire audiences breaking news content. In this way, audiences could receive personalized and semi-personalized content, in theory increasing engagement, and, with respect to breaking news, audiences could receive information while "on the same page".

With respect to social media, different news consumption behaviors are observed on different platforms. "When it comes to news, audiences say they pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This contrasts sharply with Facebook and Twitter, where news media and journalists are still central to the conversation" [9].

Thank you. I hope that this information is interesting to you. I am interested in your ideas with respect to the Web, technology, journalism, and the "future of news".


Best regards,
Adam

[9] https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2023/dnr-executive-summary
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN%2B
[11] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
[12] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 12, 2024 9:50 PM
To: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: The Web and Journalism

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. In this Community Group, we previously discussed how civic technologies could support the local journalism ecosystem [1].

Along these lines, I would like to share some articles pertaining to past and ongoing deliberations about the Web and journalism in Australia [2], Canada [3], and, more recently, California [4][5].

In a recent Google blog article [5], I discovered some interesting information: only 2% of queries on Google Search are news-related. Meanwhile, almost 62% of adults get their news from social media platforms and that number is increasing [6].

Brainstorming: should journalists on social media be able to obtain special verification badges, a.k.a. digital press passes, to verify that they are journalists and that they adhere to a code of conduct [6]? Should social media platforms compensate press-pass-holding journalists at all, per their content's ratings, or per more intricate algorithms? If so, should content from press-pass-holding journalists be distinguished from other forms of content and be measured, e.g., in terms of shares, across social media platforms to better algorithmically compensate them?

Which other technology-related topics and possibilities with respect to "the future of news" interest you? Any thoughts about real-time journalistic video streams and documentary videos [7] on streaming media services [8], where menus could be provided to navigate content?

Any other thoughts, comments, questions, or ideas on these topics? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/local-journalism-in-crisis-why-america-must-revive-its-local-newsrooms/
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/googles-fight-in-australia-could-change-the-future-of-media/
[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/google-tells-canada-it-wont-pay-link-tax-will-pull-news-links-from-search/
[4] https://www.npr.org/2024/04/12/1244416887/google-blocks-california-news-payments-bill
[5] https://blog.google/products/news/california-journalism-preservation-act-puts-news-ecosystem-at-risk/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source
[7] https://www.documentary.org/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streaming_media_services