New media applications and services are revolutionising social interaction and user experience in both society and in wide ranging industry sectors. The rapid emergence of pervasive human and environment sensing technologies, novel immersive presentation devices and high performance, globally connected network and cloud infrastructures is generating huge opportunities for application providers, service provider and content providers. These new applications are driving convergence across devices, clouds, networks and services, and the merging of industries, technology and society. Yet the developers of such systems face many challenges in understanding how to optimise their solutions (Quality of Service - QoS) to enhance user experience (Quality of Experience - QoE) and how their disruptive innovations can be introduced into the market with appropriate business models. In this report, we present the results of a new multi-disciplinary collaborative approach to product and service innovation that brings together users, technology and live events in a series of experiments conducted in real world settings. Through experimentation we have explored a broad range of technical, societal and economic challenges faced by technology providers each aiming to create and exploit new multimedia value chains in markets such as leisure and tourism, cultural and heritage, and sports science and training. The experiments highlight the features of multimedia systems and the future opportunities for companies, as the Internet continues to transition towards the increasingly connected world of Internet of Things and Big Data. We know that putting user values at the heart of design decisions and evaluation is the key to success, and that long term benefits to providers of technology, services and content must derive from enhanced user experience. Engaging users in real-world settings to co-design and assess how technology can be used is now more important than testing how technology will be operated. We have only scratched the surface of possibility in novel networked multimedia systems yet we believe that the individual and collective results in the report are significant as they are grounded in real?world evidence. A new way of conducting research and innovation has been created that maximises the potential for commercial exploitation and societal impact. We think this is extremely important and when adopted will lead to greater benefits for all.

In this article, the authors present an innovative system based on social media and high-quality multimedia content delivery designed to enhance the educational experiences of students in cultural centers and museums. The system brings together students who are viewing an educational movie and a panel of experts who might be geographically dispersed and engages them in an exciting social media experience that lets students interact with each other as well as the remote experts. The authors employ appropriate methodologies for monitoring and analyzing social network activity to extract valuable information from that activity and use it to seamlessly annotate the presented educational movie in real time using anthropocentric semantic extraction based on MPEG-7. Thus, the multimedia content of the presented movie can be easily reviewed by multiple geographically dispersed individuals, and later improved according to the received feedback, thus maximizing the benefits for students, teachers, and content producers alike. This article is part of a special issue on social media for learning.

The rapid penetration of social media in many aspects of today’s personal and professional life has created an environment where users within this emerging social cyberspace expect the kind of media experiences they are accustomed to in their daily lives with the community type of communications being at the central stage. In that context social networks and multimedia can be combined and instrumented by monitoring mechanisms to offer new experiences in many areas, among which the cultural and educational sector has a special position. This paper presents an innovative experimental system that enhances the experience of visitors in cultural centers. Apart from offering a modern, immersive, richer experience to the visitors, the proposed system involves significant benefits for the organizers as well, supplying them with valuable feedback extracted from the monitoring and analysis mechanisms. The experimental system has been successfully deployed and used in the Foundation of the Hellenic World cultural center.

The rapid growth of social media and the ubiquitous availability of audiovisual content have transformed virtually every aspect of our personal and professional lives. In Internet-based multimedia applications users with their activity (including social life) are both the source of data and the consumers of the applications, hence being involved in the creation of user-oriented business value. In this paper we present a model that blends video on demand technologies with social media into an innovative and practical distributed application to be used in situations whereby multimedia content needs to be reviewed by multiple individuals that may be geographically dispersed, and altered afterwards by other experts according to the received comments. The proposed system significantly speeds up such remote collaborations while at the same time significantly reducing their cost.

This deliverable updates the scenarios and requirements described in D2.1.2 to include on-demand features identified during connectivity phase development, the usage by driving experiments and experiments funded through the open calls. The document provides a description of the functionality that needs to be developed within the expansion phase, to be included in the V2.0 release.

The advancement of ICT has brought about significant changes in the way the cultural and creative industries work as well as in the experience they offer. However there is still a lot of potential that can be leveraged to advance the state of the art in the way the public shares collective cultural experiences. In this paper, we employ different concepts and technologies, such as high quality multimedia content production and delivery, social media interaction, and methodologies for monitoring and analyzing social network activity, to revamp the experience offered in cultural and educational centres. In addition to an increased Quality of Experience, the proposed system involves significant benefits for the organizers as well, providing them with feedback based on social analytics. The experimental system has been successfully deployed and used in the "Hellenic Cosmos" cultural center.

This deliverable updates the scenarios and requirements described in D2.1.2 to include on-demand features identified during connectivity phase development, the usage by driving experiments and experiments funded through the open calls. The document provides a description of the functionality that needs to be developed within the expansion phase, to be included in the V2.0 release.

Motivated by the revolution in the media industry brought by recent developments in video access and sharing, this paper investigates the future of internet video. We present new web standards such as HTML5, promising unified, simple and platform independent access to video files and streams, as well as novel techniques for adaptive video coding. We also analyze how these techniques can be used both over traditional client server and novel P2P based media distribution models. This analysis is followed by a description of the remaining challenges for making video a true citizen of the Web.