Current Challenges of Interactive Digital Television

This article presents a high level overview of the current challenges that Interactive Digital Television involves due to the changes in user's behaviour under the current TV watching experience. We present a short review of multiple works found in the literature which have addressed specific issues that arise on converting an only-watching setting onto an interactive experience. Moreover, we have envisioned a system architecture that evidence how second screen accompanying devices, such as mobile phones or tablets, can be used to facilitate the interactivity process from the technical and operative viewpoints. In particular, this architecture supports innovative interactive applications for automatic ad recognition utilizing a second screen device as a friendly user interface.