W3C Video on the Web Workshop 12-13 December 2007, San Jose, California and Brussels, Belgium

Call For Participation

Important Dates in 2007
Date Event
17 October Call For Participation issued.
28 November Deadline for position papers.
30 November Program released
5 December Deadline for registration.
12-13 December Workshop

Web based video is exploding. More and more we are seeing video on the Web used for advertising, enterprise collaboration, entertainment, product reviews, and other applications. As prices drop for consumer electronics, amateur and professionals alike are creating increasingly high quality videos. Social networks are sprouting up around Web-delivered media. IPTV (Internet-based delivery of television programming) is also maturing quickly. According to a study done by comScore in July 2007, 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month. We can certainly expect the same level of viewers in other countries as well.

These rapid changes are posing challenges to the underlying technologies and standards to support the platform-independent creation, authoring, encoding/decoding, and description of video. To ensure the success of video as a "first class citizen" of the Web, the community needs to build a solid architectural foundation that enables people to create, navigate, search, and distribute video, and to manage digital rights.

Goals

High-level goal: Make video a first class Web citizen, including making it easy to create, link to and from, describe, and search. Part of making video a first class Web citizen will involve addressing issues of accessibility, internationalization, privacy, digital rights, performance, and device-independence.

To this end, Workshop participants will:

  1. Share current experience with using video on the Web.
  2. Examine current technology, including W3C standards, to understand how well the Web does or does not support video.
  3. Discuss the impact (current and future) of video on the Web.
  4. Identify key target audiences and their needs. For instance:
    • end users would like to watch their favorite programs on demand and search for video content (possibly paying to view it)
    • schools wish to use video for online courses, including synchronizing live video streams with slide presentations.
    • video producers want to earn revenues from video content through advertising and describe associated digital rights.
  5. Identify roles for W3C and next steps for work at W3C to make video a first class Web citizen.

Scope

The Workshop will focus on these four areas:

  1. Strategic thinking about the impact, current and future, of video on the Web.
  2. The user experience, including search, accessibility, and parental control.
  3. Video production, including description, digital rights, and adaptation (e.g., for mobile Web access).
  4. Web architecture, including scalability issues, formats, and delivery.

Some specific topics that may be covered:

Strategic thinking
  • What are the use cases and requirements to make video a first-class object of the World Wide Web?
  • What is the impact (current and future) of video on the Web?
  • What will be the impact of advertisements, if any?
User Experience
  • How does video fit into rich Web applications and the user experience?
  • What should be done, if anything, about:
    • facilitating navigation or search in video content?
    • enable parental control and filtering?
Video Production
  • Does video content need to be adapted for the Web, for example in the mobile Web context?
  • How can authors create captions and video descriptions? How do we ensure proper access to visual information and motion by people with disabilities?
  • What should be done, if anything, about:
    • methods to add metadata or annotations in video content? What ontologies should be recommended?
    • enabling description and management of digital rights?
Web Architecture
  • What protocol or content delivery network should be used to deliver video content?
  • In its Recommendations, is there one or a small set of video/audio codecs and container formats that W3C should reference normatively? Should W3C seek to standardize any of these formats?

Audience

W3C encourages people interested in the topics listed in the scope section (strategic thinking about video on the Web, user experience, video production, and Web architecture) to participate in the Workshop.

Requirements for Participation

Position Papers

Position papers are the basis for the discussion at the Workshop. Position papers must be submitted no later than 28 November 2007. These papers will also be made available to the public (see also published position papers from previous W3C workshops). Submitting a paper constitutes recognition of the terms of this Call for Participation about publication of the position paper. Late submission of position papers may be accepted depending on space availability. Any accepted late submission won't be considered for the workshop program.

Position papers must be submitted via email to team-workshop-submissions@w3.org, an archived mailing list accessible to the W3C Team. Note that the system might ask you to confirm your submission if necessary. Don't hesitate to contact Philippe Le Hégaret (plh@w3.org) before November 29, if you think your submission got lost.

The Program Committee may ask the authors of particularly salient position papers to explicitly present their position at the Workshop. Presenters will be asked to make the slides of any presentations available to the public in HTML, PDF, or plain text.

Format

All papers should be 1 to 5 pages, although they may link to longer versions or appendixes. They must be in English. Allowed formats are (valid) HTML/XHTML, PDF, or plain text.

Workshop Organization

Workshop sessions and documents will be in English.

Chairs:
Ian Blaine, thePlatform
Paul Bosco, Cisco Systems
Philippe Le Hégaret, W3C

Program Committee

At this time, the program committee is still being assembled.

Venue

The Workshop will be hosted by Cisco Systems at 225 East Tasman Drive, San Jose, California, USA. We will also have a telepresence link with Brussels, Belgium at Pegasus Parc, De Kleetlaan 6A, 1830 Diegem, Belgium.

Deliverables

Position papers, agenda, accepted presentations, and report will also be published online.