Fast Play: A Novel Feature for Digital Consumer Video Devices

Advances in digital video technologies has brought into our home digital consumer video devices with innovative features. Not only we can store several hours of video materials, but we can also skip commercials, program the device from remote scenarios and even pause a live event. What changed little is the interface for accessing recorded video material: Play, Rewind and Fast-Forward are basically the same of analog VCR. In this paper we propose Fast Play, a novel feature designed to play out video in a time-reduced manner, without acting on the playback speed. In essence, Fast Play is a hybrid between the classic Play service and the Fast-Forward service, is based on simple low-level audio and video analysis, and provides videos with continuous motion and with completely intelligible audio. The evaluation shows that the played video is informative, enjoyable, and largely reduced (up to 40%). A Mean Opinion Score test shows that the Fast Play feature is really appreciated by users as it produces a pleasant surrogate of the original video.