SAVANT - Synchronised and Scalable AV content Across NeTworks Gabriella Kazai, Alan Pearmain, Marie-Luce Bourguet and Mounia Lalmas Queen Mary University of London Department of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) is a partner in the recently launched European IST 1 project, SAVANT 2 , which brings together key broadcasters, researchers, academics and industrialists across Europe, to advance the convergence of broadcasting and the Internet. SAVANT is developing integrated broadcast and Internet technologies simultaneously employing broadcast and telecom networks to deliver interrelated and synchronised multimedia content in an intelligent and transparent manner to end-users in order to achieve added-value services to conventional digital and interactive television. The project will provide scalable content and scalable services allowing end users to access and retrieve multimedia content under varying network conditions as well as to display such content on stationary and mobile terminals with different capabilities. The SAVANT system has three key components: content producer, delivery and user terminal. With regards to the user terminal, the main goals of the project are to provide increased functionality for the end user as follows: • Service scenarios. New types of interactive scenarios will be created including traditional digital TV together with enhanced services, consisting of rich media streamed via different networks, supporting scalability, QoS and synchronisation. • Scalable Content and Services. Techniques will be developed for creating different types of content and services in a way that facilitates transmission over various delivery channels to multimedia terminals with various capabilities (from small hand-helds up to high definition displays), where they are reconstructed and displayed. Service components will typically consist of scalable content, 3D motion analysis and animation, messages from service agents, databases for betting and results, purchasing, games, search and retrieval, watermarking and conditional access, and scalable user interfaces. • User-transparent Content Access System. A new system architecture supporting user-transparent seamless integrated service will be developed to access multimedia content from different and combined information sources (broadcast, Internet etc.) using a variety of user terminals. 1 IST (Information Society Technology) is part of the 5 th Framework Programme of the EU to promote the development of Information Technology across Europe 2 www.ist-savant.org Broadcast Internet Delivery via different networks Terminals with different capabilities