What if your TV automatically showed you links to related material?
That’s the question this BBC R&D prototype sets out to answer…
The BBC’s Andrew Littledale developed a way to show hyperlinks to BBC.co.uk pages and BBC News stories related to whatever is being said on the live channel.
Right now, it’s just a prototype, and works only with the web stream of the BBC News Channel. Some of the suggested material also looks a bit off-topic.
But imagine a more accurate version laid over your television picture, perhaps via connected-TV systems like the forthcoming Canvas and Dbook7 standards. It could be used both to enhance TV, or possibly even as a kind of live Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Adwords (not on BBC shows, of course).
The BBC has previously pledged Canvas will have both a software developers kit (SDK) and an apps-like framework. Whether it will support such a feature is unclear, but Littledale seems to be hoping so.