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A multi-user experience extending a standard TV content with AR elements is presented. It runs with both a standard tablet and a premium MR headset, the Microsoft HoloLens. A virtual TV mosaic is displayed around the TV screen and used as a GUI to control both TV and MR content. This paper focuses on the collaborative and personalized dimension offered by the experience. Unlike most AR applications, it can be simultaneously run by several users using different devices. The users can share content with others while keeping a personalized display. The added-value of such an extended TV experience has been demonstrated through complementary types of content, and user feedback confirms a real interest in this new kind of home entertainment, at the same time immersive, interactive, collaborative and personalized.

In the last years, the two networking paradigms Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), are driving the Internet evolution from a pure transport network, to a user-centric platform providing customers with different levels of quality according to their needs. By leveraging on these technologies, the European project INPUT has defined the concept of Personal Networks, an extension of the user's home Local Area Network (LAN), also including virtual images of physical devices. In this context, for many reasons that will be presented in the paper, it could be very useful to export a real hardware or software resource, that is physically or virtually located in the same Personal Network of a given user (e.g. a smart TV or a virtual set-top-box), to another Personal Network. With this in mind, this paper proposes the architecture that allows to instantiate a virtual presence in a Personal Network, in such a way that it allows using it as present locally in the visited personal network. The presented results are compliant with the SDN/NFV platform developed within the EU project INPUT.

The last fifteen years have seen the relentless rise of the feature documentary—from four titles released in UK cinemas in 2001 to one hundred and seventeen in 2015. For most documentaries, a short platform cinema release provides the oxygen of press reviews and publicity to drive DVD and VOD sales in an increasingly saturated market. This chapter analyses key trends in documentary distribution by charting the rise of Dogwoof and Picturehouse as two of the UK’s leading documentary distributors. These case studies explore the mechanics of documentary distribution and the clever marketing campaigns used by distributors to create new audiences for documentary beyond its niche market. Dogwoof’s success in home entertainment demonstrates how to develop an engaged audience for documentary despite limited theatrical exposure.

In the last few years, network “softwarization” is gaining increasing popularity to achieve dynamicity and flexibility. Cloud computing, as well as the new paradigms of software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), are supporting this evolution. However, the need to move services closer to users to guarantee low latency in the service fruition on one hand, and the trend to support personalization of services on the other, are stimulating the migration of services toward edge nodes (in the so-called “fog computing” fashion). This is the target of the INPUT platform, proposed in the INPUT project to support future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way, and with innovative added-value capabilities. The INPUT platform enables next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even replaces physical smart devices, usually placed in users’ homes (e.g., set-top-boxes, etc.), with virtual entities, providing them to users “as a Service.” In this paper, we present the INPUT paradigm and discuss a relevant use case—namely, the virtual set-top-box—adopted to prove the feasibility of the softwarized SDN/NFV paradigm jointly with the fog-computing approach for the support of personal cloud services. The INPUT platform is also compared with a legacy approach to evaluate the gain in terms of quality of experience for both static and mobile users.

This chapter explores Disney’s strategic exploitation of home video (and subsequent home entertainment) media, particularly from VHS to Blu-ray, with distinctive forms of repackaging and repurposing of animated films. Disney, above all other Hollywood studios, has found ways to develop and maintain the value of its library––and to expand the Disney brand, claiming ownership, or Disneyizing, the library titles of subsidiaries and partner production companies (Pixar, Touchstone) and even their own use of the technologies (Disney DVD, Disney Blu-ray). Disney’s actions have been large-scale and prolific, mainly because of the size of the corporation and their actions. This has made Disney particularly influential within the physical home media industry.

This chapter considers exploitation filmmaking as an industrial, economic concept. The focus of our study is an exploitation film industry known as ‘Bruceploitation’. Achieving momentum in the 1970s and early 1980s, this industry mainly comprised independent producers that sought to posthumously exploit the stardom of Bruce Lee by producing films featuring look-a-likes of the late martial artist and actor. Through this research, we have discovered that Bruceploitation provides an insight not only into the political, economic and cultural implications of satisfying demand for Bruce Lee films following his untimely death in 1973, but more importantly, the ongoing significance of exploitation as an economic model of film production and distribution.

With the gradual promotion of triple-place services and development of network technology, digital TV is gradually penetrating into daily life from conceptualization. Among them, the sharing of home entertainment information through multiple-screen interactive system is one of the most important components in digital home networks. This study firstly deeply analyzed the system architecture and functional units of DLNA; and then proposed one possible technical solution to implement multiple-screen interactive system in NGB TVOS1.0 based on DLNA agreement and characteristics of smart TV operating system. With this solution, multimedia resources like video, picture and music could be shared, controlled and managed among smart phone, personal computer and TV through network.

This paper fills the gap in the research undertaken into the entrepreneurial orientation of franchisees. The study identifies entrepreneurial orientation within a defined franchise system, using the entrepreneurial character theme matrix developed by Thompson (2002). Research methodology comprises the survey approach, using electronic media and Surveypro analysis (Dillman, 2000). Hypothesis tests highlight the absence of statistically significant entrepreneurial orientation in the franchise system, despite a significant orientation in a multiple-outlet proposition analysis. Conclusions and recommendations include mobilising and communicating the action factors associated with entrepreneurial orientation, involving all franchisees within the system. Managerial implications include the motivation of developing multiple-outlet franchise systems. Future research involves broadening the data set across industries and borders.

New waves of consumer-centric applications, such as voice search and voice interaction with mobile devices and home entertainment systems, increasingly require automatic speech recognition (ASR) to be robust to the full range of real-world noise and other acoustic distorting conditions. Despite its practical importance, however, the inherent links between and distinctions among the myriad of methods for noise-robust ASR have yet to be carefully studied in order to advance the field further. To this end, it is critical to establish a solid, consistent, and common mathematical foundation for noise-robust ASR, which is lacking at present. This article is intended to fill this gap and to provide a thorough overview of modern noise-robust techniques for ASR developed over the past 30 years. We emphasize methods that are proven to be successful and that are likely to sustain or expand their future applicability. We distill key insights from our comprehensive overview in this field and take a fresh look at a few old problems, which nevertheless are still highly relevant today. Specifically, we have analyzed and categorized a wide range of noise-robust techniques using five different criteria: 1) feature-domain vs. model-domain processing, 2) the use of prior knowledge about the acoustic environment distortion, 3) the use of explicit environment-distortion models, 4) deterministic vs. uncertainty processing, and 5) the use of acoustic models trained jointly with the same feature enhancement or model adaptation process used in the testing stage. With this taxonomy-oriented review, we equip the reader with the insight to choose among techniques and with the awareness of the performance-complexity tradeoffs. The pros and cons of using different noise-robust ASR techniques in practical application scenarios are provided as a guide to interested practitioners. The current challenges and future research directions in this field is also carefully analyzed.

In order to leverage the use of various modalities such as audio-visual materials in instilling effective learning behavior we present an intuitive approach of annotation based hapto-audio-visual interaction with the traditional digital learning materials such as e-books. By integrating the home entertainment system in the user's reading experience combined with haptic interfaces we want to examine whether such augmentation of modalities influence the user's learning patterns. The proposed Haptic E--Book (HE-Book) system leverages the haptic jacket, haptic arm band as well as haptic sofa interfaces to receive haptic emotive signals wirelessly in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators and expresses the learning material by incorporating image, video, 3D environment based augmented display in order to pave ways for intimate reading experience in the popular mobile e-book platform.

This demo presents our experiences in developing a joystick for videogames that uses RFID backscattering for battery-free operation. Specifically, we develop a system to gather data from a wireless and battery-less joystick, named JoyTag, while it interacts with a videogame console. Our system enables consumers to use JoyTag at every moment without caring about charging.

Traditional movie DVD rental model has been challenged by a new business model of movie stream. Movie stream possesses convincing advantages over the traditional DVD rental. E-commerce shows a trend in the movie industry that consumers can stream comparable quality movies and TV shows directly from the Internet instead of waiting for the DVDs in the mail. Thanks to global technology advancement, movie stream has already prevailed. This study focuses on consumers’ preferences of decision making variables for streaming movie from the Internet and the traditional DVD movie rental. The results indicate that consumers are shifting from DVD movie rental to movie stream, while home entertainment industry needs to improve both in technology and customer service. The consumers favor movie streaming and make it better competing with other ways of watching movie. The quality of movie stream and renting DVD disks may be less important for movie viewers. Movie industry should make movie stream easy to watch.

The title of David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest refers, amongst other things, to several films of the same title directed by one of the novel's characters, James O. Incandenza (also known as Himself and the Mad Stork), the last of which provides what Wallace refers to (using, not untypically, a term taken from the realm of cinema) as the novel's "MacGuffin" (Lipsky 157). Incandenza's final Infinite Jest, referred to throughout the novel and henceforth in this paper simply as "the Entertainment" (Infinite Jest 90) is, however, "not just a MacGuffin" (Lipsky 157). It is a film apparently so compelling, so entertaining, that anyone who catches as much as a glimpse of it becomes utterly entranced, unable to engage in any activity other than watching the film, over and over, until death. As such, it is also "kind of a metaphorical device" (Lipsky 157), through which Wallace explores the role of film and television in contemporary US culture. Wallace uses the term "entertainment" throughout the novel, and elsewhere in his writing (e.g., Supposedly Fun Thing 148), as a synonym for movies and television shows. This paper, then, explores first Wallace's representation of entertainment in general, and second his representations of specific "entertainments." In his short 1975 essay "Upon Leaving the Movie Theater," Roland Barthes writes about the cinema in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the Entertainment in Infinite Jest. He compares the movie-going experience to hypnosis, and he describes the spectator as glued by the nose to the screen, "riveted to the representation" (3). Essay and novel are both concerned with the question of how to "loosen the glue's grip" (3), and both present film as conducive of sleep: Barthes writes of "spectators slip[ping] into their seat as they slip into a bed, coat and feet on the seat in front of them" (2). This description is echoed in the way Wallace describes the viewing habits of the Canadian/ Saudi medical attache who becomes the Entertainment's first victim. For him, watching a selection of entertainment cartridges is a method of relaxation after a long and stressful day of dealing with the maxillofacial yeast of the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment: "at the day's end, he needs unwinding in the very worst way" (Infinite Jest 34). "Worst," here, presumably means most effective, but the choice of word implies that the attache's methods of relaxation are bad for him. Indeed they are. After Wallace explicitly compares entertainment with drugs and alcohol ("the medical attache partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits" [34]), the soon-to-be-victim settles down to watch the lethal Entertainment. His usual routine is to eat dinner "before the viewer in his special electronic recliner," which, when his entertainments have had their soporific effect, tilts backwards so that he "is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night's sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner" (34). The torpor-inducing effect of the Entertainment is far more potent than that of the attache's usual selection of cartridges, but, for Barthes and for Wallace, even normal entertainment (as opposed to the Entertainment) brings about sleep. Entertainment, for Wallace, lies on one side of a "continuum," at the other side of which is art (Lipsky 80): whereas entertainment's "chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can't tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise" (Lipsky 79) and it "gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive" (80), art "requires you to work" (174). Wallace portrays entertainment in terms that recall Barthes's descriptions of his visits to the cinema, and Wallace's own essay on David Lynch: "a commercial movie doesn't try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it" (Supposedly Fun Thing 170). …

This paper presents a new database containing high-definition audio and video recordings in a rather unconstrained video-conferencing-like environment. The database consists of recordings of people sitting around a table in two separate rooms communicating and playing online games with each other. Extensive annotation of head positions, voice activity and word transcription has been performed on the dataset, making it especially useful for evaluating automatic speech-recognition, voice activity detection, speaker localisation, multi-face detection and tracking, and other audio-visual analysis algorithms.

Many video streaming applications and services exist on the Internet, and we covered several of them in part 1 of this article.1 The most important applications argu ably fall into the mobile and home entertainment categories, which span the range of video presentation formats for portable (PD), standard (SD), and high-definition (HD) video, and these applications include both walled-garden and Internet applications. They also operate on diverse networks, and use both managed and unmanaged end-to-end network services. Here, we identify mobile and home-streaming use cases, and consider the suitability of pull-based versus push-based adaptive streaming for each use case.

The acoustic noise level of hard disk drive (HDD) is becoming more important for HDD in home entertainment applications. The residual vibration is a significant factor not only to the acoustic problem but also to the performance of HDD. In this work, a pseudo sinusoidal wave is used to design a smooth current profile to reduce acoustic noise. With consideration of current saturation limit and the maximum seeking velocity limit, a systematic method is proposed to design parameters such as the period of sinusoidal wave, the saturation time and the coasting time such that the residual vibrations are significantly reduced.

In August 2008, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) established a task force to define the parameters of a stereoscopic 3D mastering standard for content viewed in the home. The project, called 3D to the Home, was the first step in propelling the 3D home entertainment industry forward by setting the stage for a standard that will enable 3D feature films and other programming to be played on fixed devices in the home, regardless of the delivery channel. With cross-industry participation and contribution, the task force defined the concept of a 3D Home Master, identified use cases from the perspective of various entities in the supply chain of the 3D content to the home, and developed requirements for the 3D Home Master. In March 2009, the task force completed its assignments and published its report, which will form the basis for developing actual format standards within SMPTE. This report has been distributed to other standards development organizations in support of their development of related distribution and presentation standards.

The Internet has become an extremely popular source of entertainment and information. But, despite the growing amount of media content, most Web sites today are designed for access via web browsers on the PC, making it difficult for home consumers to access Internet content on their TVs or other devices that lack keyboards. As a result, the Internet is generally restricted to access on the PC or via cumbersome interfaces on non-PC devices. In this paper, we present unobtrusive and assistive technologies enabling home users to easily find and access Internet content related to the TV program they are watching. Using these technologies, the user is now able to access relevant information and video content on the Internet while watching TV.

Ozaphan was a proprietary material devised for inexpensive motion-picture film prints sold to the home market. Developed in France in the 1920s, the stock printed silent motion pictures on cellophane. In the early 1930s, Ozaphan film was introduced in Germany on a large scale for educational purposes, as well as home entertainment. The production and selling of Ozaphan films started in 1931 and ended in the mid-1960s. This essay tracks the history of this little-known film material and discusses its material properties. The production and distribution of Ozaphan films was a collaboration among Germany's film equipment manufacturers, toy industry, and commercial motion picture industry.

Store managers perform multiple tasks within a store, and the way in which they are evaluated and rewarded for these tasks affects their behavior. Using empirical data from multiple stores of a consumer electronics retailer, Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, we highlight the extent to which store manager incentive design impacts store manager behavior and, consequently, retail performance. More specifically, we describe the shift in store manager behavior resulting from a change in incentives, which, in part, altered the importance of sales relative to inventory shrinkage in the store manager compensation plan. Store managers, following this change, directed less attention to the prevention of inventory shrinkage and more toward sales-generating activities and made different process choices within the store. We observed increases in the level of inventory shrinkage and sales within these stores. Controlling for alternative drivers of sales and inventory shrinkage, we find this change in incentive design to be associated with a profit improvement of 4.2% of sales. This work indicates that altering how store managers are compensated impacts retail performance. Moreover, our findings underscore the importance of balancing the rewards given for different types of activities in contexts where agents face multiple competing tasks.

We propose a novel mobile system, called EchoTag, that enables phones to tag and remember indoor locations without requiring any additional sensors or pre-installed infrastructure. The main idea behind EchoTag is to actively generate acoustic signatures by transmitting a sound signal with a phone's speakers and sensing its reflections with the phone's microphones. This active sensing provides finer-grained control of the collected signatures than the widely-used passive sensing. For example, because the sensing signal is controlled by EchoTag, it can be intentionally chosen to enrich the sensed signatures and remove noises from useless reflections. Extensive experiments show that EchoTag distinguishes 11 tags at 1cm resolution with 98% accuracy and maintains 90% accuracy even a week after its training. With this accurate location tagging, one can realize many interesting applications, such as automatically turning on the silent mode of a phone when it is placed at a pre-defined location/area near the bed or streaming favorite songs to speakers if it is placed near a home entertainment system. Most participants of our usability study agree on the usefulness of EchoTag's potential applications and the adequacy of its sensing accuracy for supporting these applications.

This course is structured into three chapters that will introduce participants to (1) ambient intelligence principles applied to home entertainment, (2) augmented reality applications, and (3) gesture interaction design. Relevant examples from research and industry will be discussed.

Several enhancements and new features have been introduced in the television entertainment industry to offer the viewers with a high quality viewing experience when it comes to contemporary home entertainment services. Tata SKY’s direct-to-home (DTH) service is one such service that has been recently introduced in the Indian context. For achieving an increased adoption rate of this innovation, it is important to gain an understanding of the behaviour of different factors that influence the potential consumers to form positive intentions about such innovations, in turn attracting them to accept and use of such innovations. This paper, thus aims at developing a theory-based conceptual framework for examining the consumer adoption of entertainment related innovations using the innovationattributes that have been acknowledged in the recent literature as having considerable influences on the acceptance of various innovations. Innovation-attributes from Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory, Tornatzky and Klein’s meta-analysis, and Moore and Benbasat’s perceived characteristics of innovating theory will be used here to develop a conceptual framework suitable for investigating the adoption of entertainment related innovations.

This paper describes the system which provides home entertainment services to users using the middleware-cooperation module which makes UPnP and ACAP cooperate with each other. UPnP or ACAP providespowerful functionalities to its own network to play multimedia contents using its own resources. U one middleware uses the information and the resources of another middleware, itcould provide services with more contents and more powerful functionalities than those which it originally provides. This paper develops the middleware-cooperation module to make two middleware cooperate with each other and use resources of another middleware. The middleware-cooperation module makes UPnP and ACAP cooperate with each other, and it makes them share their information and resources without resource collision.

In letzter Zeit mehren sich Stimmen in den Medien, dass durch die weitere Verbreitung des Mobilfunks und von VoIP das klassische Festnetz keine Zukunft hat und in wenigen Jahren obsolet wird. Dieser Beitrag will einerseits aufzeigen, dass eine solche Pauschalaussage zu kurz greift, was durch die Betrachtung von neuen konvergenten Anwendungen wie beispielsweise untermauert wird. Andererseits wird auf einen neuen "Feind" der netzbasierten Anwendungen eingegangen, der oftmals zu wenig beachtet wird – die Consumerelektronik.

For the last four decades the miniaturization of the microchip has been the driving force behind developments in all kinds of technology, from home entertainment to space exploration. At the heart of this revolution lies the metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor, which has evolved in two ways. First, it has become smaller, with the latest devices measuring a thousandth of their original size. Second, the number of transistors that can be interconnected on a single chip has risen from a few tens to hundreds of millions.

Over the next decade, we will encounter at least three major opportunities where success will hinge largely on our ability to define appropriate standards. That’s because intelligently crafted standards that surface at just the right time can do much to nurture nascent industries and encourage product development simply by creating a trusted and reliable basis for interoperability. From where I stand, the three specific areas I see as particularly promising are: (1) all telecommunications and computing capabilities that work together to facilitate collaborative work; (2) hybrid computing/home entertainment products providing for the online distribution of audio and/or video content; and (3) wireless sensor and network platforms (the sort that some hope the 802.15.4 and ZigBee Alliance standards will ultimately enable). No doubt there will be others, but for the purposes of this discussion, these should suffice.

If you have not heard of the 2014 film Rosewater, you are not alone, as its release hardly made a blip on the radar screen of movie releases, independent or otherwise. It is not exactly a blockbust...

This paper examines the relationship between high-fidelity equipment and television during their simultaneous introduction into US homes in the immediate post-war years. Through an analysis of popular discourse, cartoons, and motion pictures, it is argued that the development of a negative view of television as "feminine" and "low" was tied, in part, to the emergence of high fidelity sound technology as a masculine bastion of high culture. The peculiar interaction of discourses of gender, taste, and technology in this process is highlighted.

This study evaluated young children's understanding of and ability to use an input device of the type associated with home-entertainment systems (like videogame players, DVD's, and other interactive systems that connect to a television set). These systems have the potential to serve as a powerful platform for delivering interactive educational programming to young children. However, the input controllers for these systems have proven extremely difficult for young children to use, as they typically require use of very small buttons that are close together, and arrow-based keys or joystick-like devices. To examine the potential for enabling young children to use such hardware devices, three adapted software interfaces were implemented. Eighty-four children, ranging in age from 36 to 59 months and from lower to lower-middle socio-economic status, participated in this study, using one of the three software interfaces to make simple on-screen choices. The results demonstrate that it is possible to enable presc...

In the last few years, stereoscopic developed very rapidly and employed in many different fields such as entertainment. Due to the importance of entertainment aspect of stereoscopic 3D (S3D) applications, a review of the current state of S3D development in entertainment technology is conducted. In this paper, a novel survey of the stereoscopic entertainment aspects is presented by discussing the significant development of a 3D cinema, the major development of 3DTV, the issues related to 3D video content and 3D video games. Moreover, we reviewed some problems that can be caused in the viewers’ visual system from watching stereoscopic contents. Some stereoscopic viewers are not satisfied as they are frustrated from wearing glasses, have visual fatigue, complain from unavailability of 3D contents, and/or complain from some sickness. Therefore, we will discuss stereoscopic visual discomfort and to what extend the viewer will have an eye fatigue while watching 3D contents or playing 3D games. The suggested solutions in the literature for this problem are discussed. Demonstrate the latest stereoscopic applications and devices

This paper describes an gesture-based system suitable for use in a party. With the Microsoft Kinect for Windows sensor, LEDs or lamps, Arduino, and a set of Relay Shield for Arduino, our module creates an immersive ambient entertainment environment that is responsive and sensitive to the presence of users reflected by their gestures, feet movements, and can roughly recognize users' mood based on their facial expressions. We use C# to develop Kinect for Windows application to detect a single user (full skeletal) movement and facial expression. In response to the user's feet/leg movement, the external LED spotlight will be turned on via Arduino Uno and its Relay Shield. The facial expression will be transferred into mood detection module. A higher mood will be used to control ambient light and play music at the same time. That said, a USB port will be used to connect the Kinect sensor, and one or two more USB ports will be used to connect to the Arduino kits. A servo-motor will be used to rotate spotlights.

In 1999, the Internet boom prompted great interest in finding ways to distribute entertainment content over the Web. In a meeting with the president of an Internet-related startup company, an entrepreneur shared his vision of distributing his broadband hardware to consumers at no cost, paying for the hardware with revenues from providing pay-per-view content to consumers over the Internet. Fueling his plan was a set of economic analyses based on the earnings revenues from a substantial portion of the 7 to 8 hours of TV consumed in the average household each day. The plan fell apart as soon as he learned that the average household rented an average of less than four movies a month, less than one movie per week. After paying for the rights to distribute movies, hardware and network costs, and marketing costs, he realized that less than a dollar per month would be left to pay for his device. He dropped the idea.

Microprocessors and miniaturized components, which have filtered into so many aspects of daily life, are now poised to sweep through passenger planes, leaving a plethora of high-tech amenities in their wake. Travelers will soon enjoy audio and video on demand, along with in-seat movies, video games, catalog shopping, phones and faxing, e-mail and Internet access. Airliners will provide a complete home entertainment system and mobile office for each passenger seat.

Once upon a time, entertainment meant getting out of the house for an evening at the movies, a trip to the ballpark, or a visit to the concert hall. But eventually entertainment followed us home and settled itself in our living rooms and dens. Community life has never been the same since. And although we may lament the isolation and loss of shared experience that have accompanied this boom in home entertainment, it's hard not to admire the science and technology behind it.

This paper uses evidence from surveys in 1997 among a total of 900 young people (aged 20–26) in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine to assess the impact of post-communism on their participation in sport and other leisure activities. Despite the rundown of public facilities and organized youth sport, participation was holding up reasonably well.Young males (and rather fewer females) were creating their own opportunities to play sport in parks and other open spaces. However, the main trends in young people’s leisure were towards home-centredness, which was associated with rising investment in home entertainment equipment, towards spending money on ‘quality’ holidays, and towards making regular visits to the bars and restaurants that private commerce had opened in all three countries.It is argued that participant sport is highly vulnerable to, rather than a likely beneficiary of, the reforms in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and that this situation is likely to continue into the 21st century.

A telephone survey was conducted in a large U.S. southeastern metropolitan area to assess consumer predispositions toward high-definition television (HDTV) and pro- file potential adopters of this technology according to demographics, mass mediause, ownership of home entertainment products, and importance of television attributes. Results were consistent with diffusion theory and research: HDTV awareness was positively related to education, income, sex (male), newspaper use, and importance of picture sharpness; HDTV interest was negatively related to age and positively related to income, moviegoing, ownership of home entertainment products, and importance of picture sharpness; and HDTV purchase intention was positively related to sports viewing and importance of screen size.

Burgeoning consumer products and services provided through cable, television, and the World Wide Web (WWW) make it challenging for consumers to organize and use their home entertainment and information centers. Assuming that this large amount of home entertainment multimedia information will come to consumers' homes through a television or a television-like device, the Spatial Browsing project explores a 3D interface solution to multimedia database browsing and searching. Philips Research in Briarcliff, New York is developing various algorithms for browsing and retrieving information in large multimedia databases. As a design research effort, the Spatial Browsing project further augments the available in-house technology in developing user interface design concepts for interacting with such databases.

Technology based out of home entertainment has not proven successful in the marketplace. The article assesses non technological factors that contribute to an entertainment facility's profitability: human element; economic metrics; and operational issues.