Utilizing DVD Players as Low-Cost Offline Internet Browsers Gaurav Paruthi Microsoft Research India v-gaupa@microsoft.com William Thies Microsoft Research India thies@microsoft.com ABSTRACT In the developing world, computers and Internet access re- main rare. However, there are other devices that can be used to deliver information, including TVs and DVD play- ers. In this paper, we work to bridge this gap by deliver- ing offline Internet content on DVD, for interactive playback on ordinary DVD players. Using the remote control, users can accomplish all of the major functions available in a Web browser, including navigation, hyperlinks, and search. As our driving application, we map the entirety of schools- wikipedia.org – encompassing 5,500 articles and 259,000 screens – to a double-layer DVD. We evaluate our system via a study of 20 low-income users in Bangalore, India. Using our DVD as reference, participants are able to answer factual questions with over 90% success. While most participants prefer to use a computer if one is available, for resource-poor environments the DVD platform could represent a viable and low-cost alternative. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 User Interfaces; K.3.1 Computers and Education INTRODUCTION While many of us in the industrialized world have come to rely on having continuous access to the Internet, we repre- sent a small minority: as of 2009, nearly three quarters of the world’s population are classified as Internet non-users [2]. In countries such as India, Internet penetration stands at 5.7% [4] while the penetration of broadband is less than 1% [5]. At the same time, developing regions have witnessed signif- icant penetration of other information and communication technologies, including television and DVD players. In In- dia, 58% of households have television and 9% have DVD players; DVD penetration is expected to rise to 21% by 2013 (exceeding the projected penetration of Internet-enabled PCs, which stands at 8.9%) [4]. Even in rural villages and urban slums, households often manage to acquire and sustain TVs and DVD players – as well as DVDs themselves, which are widely copied and distributed through informal markets. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0267-8/11/05...$10.00. In this paper, we aim to enable new and interesting inter- actions with an old piece of technology: the DVD player. While DVD players are typically used for watching movies, they also include a rich set of interactive features that are rarely utilized to their full potential. Just as one can use a DVD menu to select the chapter of a movie, it is possible to map hundreds of thousands of menus to a single disc and navigate between them using the remote control [1]. This opens the door to new applications, including the delivery of offline Internet content for browsing on TV and DVD. As an initial exploration of this idea, we have mapped the entirety of Schools-Wikipedia [6] to a DVD. The DVD con- tains about 5,500 articles from Wikipedia, which translate to over 259,000 interactive screens on TV. Unlike prior efforts to map Wikipedia or other Internet content to DVD, our disc is playable in off-the-shelf DVD players without any depen- dence on a computer. Our DVD offers navigation functions that are comparable to a Web browser, including search, hy- perlinks, scrolling, and a back button (see Figure 1). This paper makes two contributions. First, we present an in- novative and generalizable design for navigating and search- ing offline Internet content using the DVD platform. Sec- ond, we demonstrate that our design is usable via a study of 20 low-income users in Bangalore, India. Our conclusion is that while TV-DVD is not superior to a computer for de- livering offline Internet content, it can nonetheless provide similar functionality at much lower cost. RELATED WORK We are unaware of any other tools or techniques for view- ing offline Internet content on DVD players. While there are many efforts to build an offline version of Wikipedia on CD or DVD (e.g., [7]), none of the discs produced to date work on an ordinary DVD player. They utilize HTML or compressed formats that require a computer for playback. The WikiReader [8] is a $99 portable device designed specif- ically for reading Wikipedia. It can hold 3 million articles, compared to the 5,500 articles that we fit on a double-layer DVD. However, WikiReader omits all images, limits the dis- play to black and white, and has a 240 x 200 resolution (less than that of a TV). The primary advantage of our solution is to leverage existing household technologies to enable any- one to copy and distribute the disc at very low cost. In India, there are varied educational materials available on DVD, for example, from BookBox or Pebbles Infotainment;