The main objective of the ePerSpace project is to significantly increase the user acceptance of networked audiovisual systems and applications at home and virtually anywhere by developing innovative interoperable value-added networked services. From an industrial perspective, ePerSpace aims at creating a mass-market adoption of such advanced services thanks to this significantly increased user acceptance.
To address this challenge in audiovisual and home systems ePerSpace will concentrate on technical, social and business objectives:
Social and business aspects: develop and enhance the business aspects of the ePerSpace services, analysing issues of major importance to the mass-market adoption, and hence the potential for economically sound business solutions. The analysis will result in generic business models, and techno-economic analysis based on dissemination activities including trials and user surveys.
Technical objectives: develop an open, trusted and interoperable integration framework to show how various network enabled audiovisual systems and home platform products can seamlessly work together, thus solving existing interoperability problems in the exchange of personalisation data, service and context adaptation, and management of service platforms. Interoperability and global network integration will be achieved by addressing adequate authentication procedures at home and elsewhere in an open access network. Seamless and intuitive access to services will be enabled through distributed personalisation data.
The ePerSpace objectives will be realised through innovations in four major work areas of the project:
The Home Platform providing the means to exchange audiovisual content between user terminals and home equipment.
Global Network Integration & Interoperability offering innovative seamless access by sharing user profiles in a secure manner.
Home and Personal Devices building unified personal environments.
Rich Media Object Management supplying the tools for content creators to make optimal use of the infrastructure.
Development of an open, trusted and interoperable integration framework.
Integration of different technologies into services and applications.
User acceptance of networked audiovisual systems and applications at home and virtually anywhere.
Innovative personalised value-added networked services.
The existing services such as eLearning, eHealth, eBanking, eGovernment etc., as well as the other electronic related community services are limited by several factors. These limitations will be removed by making available an open access network (OAN) using seamless authentication; by integrating the home platform and home audiovisual equipment with a variety of user devices; by using the personalisation profiles as a means of adapting contents to specific user, user requirements and communication devices; by providing the infrastructure for a mass market, but addressing the budget limitations of various user groups in society, by simplifying both the infrastructure and the intuitive access to services, and hence improving the user-friendliness of the system.
This will enable cost-effective broadband access to Europe's citizens at home and elsewhere. Easy and intuitive access to the advanced multimedia and audiovisual services anywhere anytime in the future generation of service provisioning systems will also enable eEuropean citizens to use these services. This leads to the conclusion that this will be the only scenario in which a real boost in service provisioning can be successfully achieved, opening new market opportunities for the manufactures, telecom operators, content providers, and the third party value-added service providers.
ePerSpace will create novel business models and will identify and enhance the key success factors, in order to enable the innovative ideas of the Project to be utilised by the mass market in Europe.