Companion Screen Architecture for Bridging TV Experiences and Life Activities

The diversification of personal lifestyles has complicated the roles of media and associated service consumption. In our current era, when people start to use new services by transitioning from one service or device to another, bothersome operations can decrease their motivation to use the new services effectively. For example, even though companion screen services are now available on integrated broadcast-broadband systems, broadcast accessibility from mobile service remains suboptimal because existing architectures remain television (TV)-centric and cannot use these services effectively. In response to this issue, we propose a user-centric companion screen architecture (CSA) that can tune to a specified TV channel and launch broadcast-related TV applications from mobile and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices. We confirmed the general versatility of this CSA by prototyping multiple use cases involving various broadcasters and by evaluating broadcast accessibility from mobile devices via user tests. The obtained results showed that 86% of the examinees expressed improved user satisfaction and that 78% the examinees reported a potential increase in the number of broadcasts they would watch. Thus, we conclude that our proposed CSA improves broadcast accessibility from mobile and IoT services and can help bridge the gap between TV experiences and life activities.