HTML5 is driving a strong trend towards interoperable Web-based applications, enabling a wider range of devices to run this kind of applications. The key challenge of next-generation media applications is to federate cooperative devices to provide multi-device experiences overcoming current second screen solutions within the connected TV industry. There is a gap on the experience of users, since they perceive devices as isolated pieces of applications when they would prefer to have a single experience through multiple devices at the same time. This paper proposes a unified methodology and a common specification over Web Components for the adaptation of a single application, seamlessly running different instances on one or more devices simultaneously, according to the multi-device context of the user and the specific features of the devices. The solution presented in this paper extends current Web standards towards an interoperable architecture and offers broadcasters and media application developers the possibility to easily design applications that will automatically provide a unique consistent experience across the connected devices. The architectural design is targeted to be included in the roadmap of the standards.

With the steadily increasing amount of digital multimedia content, the user will be more and more overstrained. This applies to content being permanently available like videos of online video services as well as broadcast content like in the TV or radio domain. A promising solution for this problem is personalization. In the context of this paper, we refer to the selection and recommendation of content with respect to user's interests and preferences as personalization. These recommendations can either be presented to the user herself or be further used by services like a personalized electronic program guide (EPG) in the TV domain or for automated and personalized selection of content of online video services. This paper introduces an approach to personalize digital multimedia content based on user profile information. For this, two main mechanisms were developed: a profile generator that automatically creates user profiles representing the user preferences, and a content-based recommendation algorithm that estimates the user's interest in unknown content by matching her profile to metadata descriptions of the content. Both features are integrated into a personalization system.

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This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user's or group of user's preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information.

Welcome to The Best of IET and IBC 2015-16. This is the seventh volume of an annual joint publication between the Institution of Engineering and Technology and IBC.The IET is a formal member of the IBC's partnership board but, beyond this, it has a long-standing and close relationship with the organisation, through which they together encourage and promote professional excellence in the field of media technology. Nowhere is this relationship more strongly reflected than in the pages of this publication, which celebrates the very best technical media papers from this year's IBC Proceedings and the IET's flagship journal, Electronics Letters.This year, our editorial takes a look at the exciting technology on show in IBC's Future Zone -an area of exhibition space where the world's most hi-tech media companies and research organisations proudly demonstrate their very latest concepts and experimental technologies. Here, you can not only see tomorrow's media but you have the opportunity to experience it personally, leaving impressions that will remain with you long after you have left Amsterdam.We then present nine papers chosen as the best contributions to IBC2015 by the IBC Technical Papers Committee and the executive team of the IET Multimedia Communications Network. These include the overall winner of IBC's award for the Best Conference Paper, 'A Display-independent High Dynamic Range Television System' and papers representing other hot topics of 2015: UHDTV (Ultra High Definition Television), HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding), second screen applications, 4G broadcasting, MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) technologies, hybrid content radio and some remarkable new results in on-screen subtitling.We are also pleased to present personal interviews with individuals whose significant work appears in this volume. First, Andrew Cotton and Tim Borer of the BBC, authors of IBC2015's Best Conference Paper, who discuss their work on HDR. Find out where their inventive ideas come from, how they combine both psychology and engineering in their work and what the most memorable parts of their project have been.We then interview IBC's Best Young Professionals: Raphaël Guénon and François Manciet. Both researchers in their mid20s whose work has revealed some fascinating conclusions about second-screen media applications. Get a glimpse of their personal worlds. Find out: what motivates them to work in this area, whether they use second screens themselves and what they think about the future of immersive media.From Electronics Letters this year we include a selection of media-related papers which have been published since IBC2014. Electronics Letters has a very broad scope, covering the whole range of electronics-related research and the papers chosen this year are those which we believe will have the greatest impact on media technology as well as the greatest potential for expanding service provision with existing infrastructures.The IBC papers printed here represent the best of almost 300 synopses submitted to us ...