<p>This thesis covers design and implementation of a media system solution for home networks with personal computers and a set-top box. </p><p>In a home there are effectively two independent media systems with the same purpose: the personal computer and the digital set-top box, with the purpose of delivering digital media in form of audio and video to the consumer.</p><p>The goal of the thesis work was to implement a solution that bridges the gap between the two systems, so that the user, from the set-top box, can play back media that is actually stored on one or several personal computers. </p><p>Our solution is based on UPnP technology, which is used for service discovery and control. The choice of UPnP is motivated by an evaluation of discovery protocols, which concludes that UPnP is the most suitable technology in this particular system. Also, an evaluation of suitable transport protocols was done. Here,HTTP was used. </p><p>For the personal computer, a media server and a graphical user interface for configuring the media server were created. For the set-top box, a media client, and a graphical user interface for browsing the content of the media server, were created. In conclusion, the creation of the prototype was successful and the set-top box was able to playback media that had been shared by the PC on the network.</p>

<p>This theses covers the design and implementation of recording functionality for a set-top box in a home network. An initial investigation is done and possibilities for extending the system to support specific features are presented. </p><p>Digital TV is becoming more common each day, and soon it will be more widely used than todays analogue standard. At the same time the need for recording TV shows remains the same or is increasing, which is shown by the number of PVR solutions popping up on the market. </p><p>The goal of this thesis work was to investigate the possibilities for extending an existing set-top box to support common PVR features and, if possible, to implement a prototype. This was supposed to be done in a home network environment with the set-top box as the digital media center. </p><p>A satisfying solution, covering basic recording functionality is defined and implemented. The solution includes recording to a USB hard drive and to a PC on the local network. On top of this, a graphical user interface is built and some simple benchmarks show the performance of the set-top box with the new functionality.</p>

Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att genom kvalitativa intervjuer lyfta fram motpolerna kringdagens konsumtion av digital underhållningsmedia och fastställa om konsumenters syn på värdekan relateras till deras val av att antingen betala för ägandet eller för tillgänglighet av den. Metoden har bestått av åtta stycken kvalitativa intervjuer där respondenter fått frågor om sinkonsumtion av digitala underhållningsmedia inom; musik, video, spel och podcasts. Uppsatsen kommer fram till att konsumenter ser värdet i användningen av mediet och inte iägandet av det. Konsumenterna vill således hellre strömma sin media än att ladda ner den. Deväljer därför mer eller mindre obehindrat den tjänst som har bäst utbud. Konsumenterna menardock att det i dagsläget finns en viss otrygghet i strömningstjänsterna. Otryggheten växer ju merengagemang mediet kräver, vilket gör att spel och video som enligt respondenterna var primäraaktiviteter, vilka kräver högre engagemang, har en tendens att hellre vilja laddas ner avkonsumenterna medan musik och podcast, vilka kräver lägre engagemang, sekundära aktiviteter, hellre strömmas. / Purpose/Aim: The purpose of the thesis was to examine if consumers perceived the value of digital media entertainment in the access of the media and/or the ownership of it. Material/Method: The material consisted of 8 qualitative interviews which was presented in anarrative form. The interviews investigated consumers digital media entertainment habits and inparticular if the consumers downloaded or streamed their content. Main results: Consumers perceived the value of digital media entertainment through the accessof it, value-in-use, rather than in the ownership of it, value-in-exchange. On the other hand, themore engaged the consumers were in their use of the media, the more concerned they were withdownloading the content rather than streaming it.

Background: The brand embodied a set of values and attributes which were appropriate, which stimulated consumer interest, which distinguished brand from others and created a unique piece of property for its owners. From marketing point of view, brands are the means that consumers use to distinguish products and services based on essential and non-essential attributes and they are a source of business’s differential advantage. Furthermore, brands communicate tangible and intangible advantages and are attractive to a range of feeling. In order to make decisions for brand strategy, branding plays an important role. Kotler and Keller (2006) state that a brand is needed because it identifies the product, and the responsibility of the product hence lies in the hands of the makers or producers of the product. Brands are important in both consumer and business-to-business situations, where a decision of purchase is needed. A strong brand can create sufficient higher total returns to shareholders than a weak brand. Brands are at the heart of marketing and business strategy ( Doyle,1998, p.165) and building brand equity or strong brands, is considered to be one of the key drivers of a business success ( Prasad &amp; Dev, 2000; p.22). Problem Statement: What are the promotional strategies company’s uses to create International brand in order to pursue the potential customer in B2C marketing environment?? Purpose:The purpose of the thesis is to investigate how firm employ effective promotional tools and techniques to create and sustain international brand in the customers mind. Research design: Both Qualitative and Quantitative method is applied in this thesis. Primary data is collected from interview (E-mail and telephone) and internet survey, while secondary data is gathered from books, journals, and internet source. Conclusion: The promotional tools capabilities can help businesses to spread the messages to the mass market. It is very powerful technique to be used to increase brand awareness of the organization. We found out those promotional tools such as sales promotion, direct marketing, personal selling, publicity, advertisement, and internet marketing play vital role to create international brand.

The Ambivalent Animal project explores the interactions of animals, culture and technology. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory, each in ways that inspire the other. My creative practice centers around two projects that focus on domestic pets. These projects highlight the animal's uncertain status as they explore the overlapping ontologies of animal, human and machine. They provide concrete artifacts that engage with theoretical issues of anthropocentrism, animality and alterity. My theoretical work navigates between the fields of animal studies, art and design, media and culture studies, and philosophy. My dissertation explores animality through four real and imagined animal roles: cyborg, clone, chimera and shapeshifter. Each animal role is considered in relation to three dialectics: irreducibility and procedurality, autonomy and integration, aura and abjection. These dialectics do not seek full synthesis but instead embrace the oscillations of irresolvable debates and desires. The dialectics bring into focus issues of epistemology, ontology, corporeality and subjectivity. When the four animal roles engage the three dialectics, connected yet varied themes emerge. The cyborgian animal is simultaneously liberated and regulated, assisted and restricted, integrated and isolated. The cloned animal is an emblem of renewal and loss; she is both idealized code and material flesh and finds herself caught in the battles of nature and nurture. The chimera is both rebel and conformist; his unusual juxtapositions pioneer radical corporeal transgressions but also conform to the mechanisms of global capital. And the shapeshifter explores the thrill and anxiety of an altered phenomenology; she gains new perceptions though unstable subjectivity. These roles reveal corporeal adjustments and unfamiliar subjectivities that inspire the creative practice. Both my writing and making employ an ambivalent aesthetic--an aesthetic approach that evokes two or more incompatible sensibilities. The animal's uncertain status contributes to this aesthetic: some animals enjoy remarkable care and attention, while others are routinely exploited, abused and discarded. Ambivalence acknowledges the complexity of lived experience, philosophical and political debate, and academic inquiry. My approach recognizes the light and dark of these complex ambivalences--it privileges paradox and embraces the confusion and wonder of creative research. Rather than erase, conceal or resolve ambiguity, an ambivalent aesthetic foregrounds the limits of language and representation and highlights contradiction and irresolution.

Parent-child social games, such as peek-a-boo and patty-cake, are a key element of an infant's earliest social interactions. The analysis of children's behaviors in social games based on video recordings provides a means for psychologists to study their social and cognitive development. However, the current practice in the use of video for behavioral research is extremely labor-intensive, involving many hours spent extracting and coding relevant video clips from a large corpus. From the standpoint of computer vision, such real-world video collections pose significant challenges in the automatic analysis of behavior, such as cluttered backgrounds, the effect of varying camera angles, clothing, subject appearance and lighting. These observations motivate my thesis work - automatic retrieval of social games from unstructured videos. The goal of this work is both to help accelerate the research progress in behavioral science and to take the initial steps towards the analysis of natural human interactions in natural settings. Social games are characterized by repetitions of turn-taking interactions between the parent and the child, with variations that are recognizable by both of them. I developed a computational model for social games that exploits the temporal structure over a long time-scale window as quasi-periodic patterns in a time series. I presented an unsupervised algorithm that mines the quasi-periodic patterns from videos. The algorithm consists of two functional modules: converting image sequences into discrete symbolic sequences and mining quasi-periodic patterns from the symbolic sequences. When this technique is applied to video of social games, the extracted quasi-periodic patterns often correspond to meaningful stages of the games. The retrieval performance on unstructured, lab-recorded videos and real-world family movies is promising. Building on this work, I developed a new feature extraction algorithm for social game categorization. Given a quasi-periodic pattern representation, my method automatically selects the most relevant space-time interest points to construct the feature representation. Our experiments demonstrate very promising classification performance on social games collected from YouTube. In addition, the method can also be used to categorize TV videos of sports rallies, demonstrating the generality of this approach. In order to support and encourage more research on human behavior analysis in realistic contexts, a video database of realistic child play in natural settings has been collected and is published on our project website (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/socialgames), along with annotations. The unsupervised quasi-periodic pattern mining method represents a substantial generalization of conventional periodic motion analysis. Its generality is evaluated by retrieving motions of a range of quasi-periodicity from unstructured videos. The performance was compared with that of a periodic motion detection method based on motion self-similarity. Our method demonstrates superior retrieval performance with a 100% precision when the recall is up to 92.04%, with much fewer parameters than that of the other method.

In more than two decades of research and practical experiments in interactive digital narrative (IDN), much insight about the relationship of narrative and digital media has been gained and many successful experiments have been undertaken, as a survey of the field illustrates. However, current approaches also limit the scope of experimentation and constrain theory in interactive narrative forms original to digital media. After reviewing the "interactivisation" of legacy theory (neo-Aristotelian poetics for interactive drama, poststructuralism for hyperfiction, 20th century narratology for interactive fiction and as a general theory for IDN), the thesis introduces a theoretical framework that changes the focus from the product-centered view of legacy media towards system and the process of instantiation. The terms protostory describing the overall space of potential narratives in an IDN system, narrative design for the concrete assemblage of elements and narrative vectors as substructures that enable authorial control are introduced to supersede legacy terms like story and plot. On the practical side, the thesis identifies limitations of existing approaches (e.g. legacy metaphors like the timeline, and authoring tools that support only particular traditions) To overcome these limitations a software toolset built on the principles of robustness, modularity, and extensibility is introduced and some early results are evaluated. Finally, the thesis proposes an inclusive, open-ended iterative process as a structure for future IDN research in which practical implementations and research co-exist in a tightly coupled mutual relationship that allows changes on one side to be integrated on the other.

Designers of information communication technologies (ICTs) in public space often fall into the trap of designing only for the "flaneur," an unembedded mobile subject in the generic global city. They deracinate the experience of space and support the global flâneur as the paradigmatic deracinated subject. In this thesis I propose a specific vision of "en-racinating" media, that is media that takes the specificity of place seriously. A careful consideration of public art can help us in this endeavor by leveraging the artistic notion of "site specificity" in the most culturally grounded meaning of the term. I examining three public digital media/information-based public art works through the lens of urban informatics in order to see how the works do or do not en-racinate experience in a specific city: Atlanta

This work theorizes the contemporary attraction to three-dimensional media. In doing so, it reframes ongoing debates surrounding digital three-dimensional media in order to critique the neoliberal social relations such media engender. I argue that the contemporary interest in dimensionality, especially regarding digital media, is symptomatic of a broad cultural shift, wherein millions of lives are now essentially being lived through two-dimensional, "flat" media, which have consequently generated a lack of spatial relationships and a craving or desire for "depth." This "desire for depth" has arisen in contemporary society because people are being "spread too thin" through a combination of the radical connectivity afforded by digital technology and the demand for limitless flexibility imposed by the market: a condition I call hyper-extensionality. My work examines how neoliberal capitalism necessitates the individualized, radical connectivity now experienced by millions of people, and subsequently generates our attraction to three-dimensionality in digital media. Through analyses of select, prominent forms of three-dimensional media, I show that commercial three-dimensional media largely functions to maintain the status quo by helping alleviate the feeling of "depthlessness" in the social unconscious.

This dissertation investigated the bottom-up technology transmission process in a country with varied levels of technology diffusion, such as Chile. In particular, I explored how children act as technology brokers within their families by influencing their parents' adoption of and learning about digital media, so as to include older generations in the digital environment. In order to do this, I measured to what extent this process occurs, I proposed a typology of factors that intervene in the process and analyzed the outcomes variables related to the phenomenon. Methodologically, I used a mixed-methods research approach by combining in-depth interviews with a self-administered paper-and-pencil survey taken by dyads of one parent and one child. I analyzed 28 interviews involving one 12 to 18-year-old child and one parent or legal guardian (14 dyads) stratified by socioeconomic background, age, and gender. In addition, I conducted the parent-child survey among school-aged children and their parents in three schools, stratified by socioeconomic status. One class per cohort from 7th to 11th grades was randomly surveyed. In total, 381 students and 251 parents completed the surveys. The analyses showed that bottom-up technology transmission occurs at some degree for all the technologies investigated in this study. However, children's influence should not be overstated because they play only one part among a number of factors involved in the digital inclusion of older generations. It also established a typology of factors related to the process at different levels, including structural influences, family structure, strategies employed by youth, and psychological dispositions of parents. Specifically, the analyses consistently found that this process was more likely to occur among people from a lower socioeconomic status. Also, the transmission was associated with more fluid parent-child interactions and occurred among parents who perceived the technology to be useful. Regarding the outcome variables, it demonstrated that this phenomenon is linked, although weakly, to greater levels of perceived competence among parents and higher esteem among young people. Finally, it suggested that bottom-up technology transmission is associated with the reduction of some socioeconomic gaps in digital media use. / text