Go beyond boundaries of iTV applications

The development of multimedia applications that require the manipulation and the synchronization of multiple media and the handling of different types of user interactions usually requires specialized knowledge in imperative languages. Declarative languages have been proposed in order to make this task easier, especially when applications are restricted to certain classes, as it is the case of Interactive TV applications in which user interactions are restricted to a few simple models. However, those simple models may be too simple when documents are reused in other platforms: for instance, when watching a video most web users expect an interactive timeline to be available --- which is not the case in interactive TV videos. This paper presents a component-based approach to the enrichment of declarative languages for multimedia so that desirable user-media interactions are made possible at the same time that the original ease of authoring is maintained. We detail the components and present a corresponding proof-of-concept prototype. We also discuss design decisions associated with the development of the components, which should be useful in further extensions.