From a technological point of view, two different tracks are followed for the provision of easy and fast access to the sports events: novel set-top-box technology for content-rich access from the house environment of the citizen and 3rd generation mobile telephony for ubiquitous access. Software ergonomics will play a major role in creating a satisfying user experience. In the following Figure, an indicative breakdown of tasks is visualized, presenting an abstract schema of the envisaged architecture.



To accomplish its objectives, MELISA will spend significant efforts to:

• Develop authoring tools for production, encoding and playback of rich interactive multimedia content in MPEG-4 for a variety of devices over wireless and digital television networks.
• Develop tools for enabling the production and placement of dynamic promotion of sports related and other products utilizing in full the enhancements to be provided by MELISA.
• Develop the tools and infrastructure to support intelligent real time game statistics and enhancements by gathering information from various sources, both historical and during the events.
• Develop the infrastructure to support real time and play-by-play betting services with its associated e-commerce transaction engine.
• Demonstrate the validity of the proposed service in field trials of specific usage scenarios, focusing on usability and perceived quality of service.

MELISA will also focus on:

• Developing and deploying enhanced information visualization technology by providing real-time video augmentation.
• Developing fast algorithms for the real time calculation of game related statistics.
• Using open standards for the new media content, based on MPEG-4, as well as the necessary metadata, based on MPEG-7. The overall publishing chain will take into consideration consumer protection and privacy and follow/contribute to the principles introduced by the emerging MPEG-21 standard.