With the massive growth of cutting-edge media services such as Ultra-High Definition (UHD/4K) video and immersive media (i.e. Virtual and Augmented Reality-VR/AR), demand for large investments in a scalable, ubiquitous, and robust communication infrastructure and services increases enormously. The H2020 5GCity project aims to provide a solution for such issues by designing, developing, and deploying a sliceable, distributed Cloud/Edge & radio platform with neutral hosting capability to support the sharing between Information Technology (IT) infrastructure owners and media service providers (i.e. vertical media actors). In this work, we initially introduce the essential benefits of the 5GCity technology and neutral host model to facilitate the rise of highly-demanding media Use Cases (UCs) and its implication on how service providers typically operate (in terms of business model). Then, we show how the 5GCity architecture and infrastructure, in light of certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), address this demand through three media UCs (namely related to "video acquisition and production at the edge", "immersive services", and "mobile production and transmission") and we explain how they are implemented and deployed in real citywide pilots (in Bristol, Lucca, and Barcelona) to demonstrate the benefits for infrastructure owners and media service providers*.

The way we watch television is changing with the introduction of attractive Web activities that move users away from TV to other media. The social multimedia and user-generated contents are dramatically changing all phases of the value chain of contents (production, distribution and consumption). We propose a concept-level integration framework in which users' activities on different social media are collectively represented, and possibly enriched with external knowledge, such as information extracted from the Electronic Program Guides, or available ontological domain knowledge. The integration framework has a knowledge graph as its core data model. It keeps track of active users, the television events they talk about, the concepts they mention in their activities, as well as different relationships existing among them. Temporal relationships are also captured to enable temporal analysis of the observed activity. The data model allows different types of analysis and the definition of global metrics in which the activity on different media concurs with the measure of success.

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People on the Web talk about television. TV users' social activities implicitly connect the concepts referred to by videos, news, comments, and posts. The strength of such connections may change as the perception of users on the Web changes over time. With the goal of leveraging users' social activities to better understand how TV programs are perceived by the TV public and how the users' interests evolve in time, we introduce a knowledge graph to model the integration of the heterogeneous and dynamic data coming from different information sources, including broadcasters' archives, online newspapers, blogs, web encyclopedias, social media platforms, and social networks, which play a role in what we call the "extended life" of TV content. We show how our graph model captures multiple aspects of the television domain, from the semantic characterization of the TV content, to the temporal evolution of its social characterization and of its social perception. Through a real use-case analysis, based on the instance of our knowledge graph extracted from (the analysis of) a set of episodes of an Italian TV talk show, we discuss the involvement of the public of the considered program.

SUMMARYSatellite-based telecom systems probably represent the easiest solution to reduce the digital divide in lessfavoured areas owing to their wide geographical coverage and the speed and ease of deployment of terminal equipment. However, a satellite system must be efficient, cost-effective and capable of full interworking with state-of-the-art terrestrial broadband networks. This paper presents the architecture and the main performance results of a two-way broadband satellite-based system that was developed in the framework of the European Commission's FP6 UNIC project (UNIversal satellite home Connection). The aim of UNIC was twofold: on one side, it addressed the urban-rural digital divide by exploiting at best the features of existing advanced two-way satellite technologies; on the other, the project also investigated how to bridge the 'social divide' that arises from the lack of computer ownership or computer literacy of certain classes of end-users, by providing interactive services on a standard TV set through an ad-hoc Set-Top-Box. The UNIC system architecture is based on DVB-S2 and DVB-RCS technologies in the forward and the return link, respectively, possibly paired by a local terrestrial wireless network (e.g. Wi-Fi) for the distribution of connectivity to end-users. The UNIC set-top box is fed by the satellite gateway via a standard IP connection either through the local terrestrial network or directly to the satellite network. Management of the satellite bandwidth is optimized by the UNIC platform through the adoption of an adaptive resource allocation technique based on the flexible framing structure of DVB-S2: the key factor in this respect turns out to be the feature of adaptive coding and modulation (ACM), together with a suited quality of service (QoS) policy to control the amount of data that are fed into the network.