Personalcasting : interactive local augmentation of television programming

Abstract

While a videocassette recorder allows a television viewer to decouple the viewing of a television program from its broadcast, its use would be much more rewarding were it able to "understand" what it had recorded and to utilize this information to vary the presentation of broadcast television programs in a personalized manner. A hardware/software system is developed which uses closed-captioning information as a data input and allows variation in the presentation of television newscasts, with results applicable to the locally-intelligent recording and personalized presentation of other sorts of programming as well. The research described in this thesis has been supported in part by the International Business Machines Corporation.