A survey on user studies and technical aspects of mobile multimedia applications

Some years ago, Mobile TV has been introduced in several countries all over the world. It was expected that it would play a major role among traditional TV services. Unfortunately, the success has been limited at the beginning. Since Mobile TV brings new aspects into television, like small screens, consumption in noisy surroundings, etc., it also represents a new challenge on how to create, transfer and present content that maximizes the consumer experience. Today, some of these issues have been solved. Due to the introduction of smart phones and the large amount of available applications customers are starting to use their mobile phones for several purposes including mobile multimedia services. As a consequence, the concept for Mobile TV has changed significantly. In the past, research has often been focusing on one particular aspect of this new TV scheme, as well as surveys on this research often neglected aspects that still might be of interest when trying to understand the dependencies of Mobile TV content and presentation to perceived quality. In this survey paper we want to discuss challenges and requirements in a comprehensive way, trying to shed light on all relevant aspects of Mobile TV. The aim of this paper is to give a good overview about the state of the art with the focus of users' need and experiences. A large collection of technical aspects and research results represents a special interest of this study. Finally, we want to discuss a framework for mobile multimedia applications which is relevant for further research work. (C) 2011 International Federation for Information Processing Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.