Cloud-Based Personalization of New Advertising and e-Commerce Models for Video Consumption

Over the last few years, we have witnessed a generalization of the consumption of video contents through different media (computers, television, mobile phones, tablets,) that converge into a unified user experience in an (almost) all-IP technological environment. At the same time, there have been significant advances in the generation and characterization of multimedia contents, due to the advent of social networking and the consolidation of standards like moving picture experts group (MPEG)-4 and MPEG-7. Finally, it is becoming easier and more natural to interact with multimedia contents, thanks to devices like tactile screens and touchpads. Overall, this landscape enables great possibilities for advertising and e-commerce, far beyond the traditional business models of broadcast TV. In this paper, we present a novel realization of two non-invasive advertising and e-commerce models to exploit those possibilities, grounded on a cloud-based personalization engine. This system cannot only identify the most interesting products to advertise to each user at any time, but also compose personalized applications on the fly, ready to run on different consumer device platforms. Our experiments show that this proposal can be very positively perceived by the end users.