Smart Electronic Program Guide (EPG)

Context

MEO’s Catch-up TV service (Gravações Automáticas) adds new content to its catalog by permanently recording live TV channels and slicing them according to the latest EPG, however, this approach presents several issues.
Because the EPG is manually updated and refreshed only twice a day, it is often out of sync with the actual live programs. Thus, given that no advertising signaling exists (in-band or off-band) to differentiate commercials from actual programs, this slicing process must add pre and post paddings to the recording process, in order to prevent clipping the content, either at the end or at the beginning. This generates additional content that the user must often skip when trying to watch a show, and prevents next-program recommendations at the end of the current streaming session.
An internal project already exists that deals with the problematic identification of TV commercials on TV content, however, this detection by itself is not enough to correct the EPG and improve the user experience by auto-skipping to the actual start of a program, and knowing when the program actually ended.
The first goal of this project is to combine the outputs of the existing TV commercials detection system with an intelligent “EPG correction tool” in order to be enable smart-start and smart-end features on MEO’s Catch-up TV service.
Additionally we are also interested in the enrichment of existing EPG metadata, by extracting additional features from the video stream (and not only if it is a program or an ad). E.g., detecting which people were on the show or what kind of show it is for better program matching.
More information: http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/

Project objectives