Internet Protocol Television Services Research Articles

A SURVEY ON RECENT ADVANCES IN IPTV

After the success of carrying voice over IP networks, the dream of an IP-based television is being turned into reality with the research and standardization efforts. Today, standardization organizations, researchers, as well as commercial companies are putting huge efforts to make Internet Protocol TeleVision (IPTV) successful. The achieved successes of IPTV are due to many factors including mainly the advanced video coding techniques, the continuously increasing Internet bandwidth that end users have been enjoying, and the mature wired and wireless networking protocols and architectures. Although IPTV still faces many challenges, many content providers as well as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) already started to deliver IPTV services to customers. Nevertheless, the way ahead is still long and more efforts are required. This paper surveys a breadth of research areas related to IPTV. It first discusses the general service architecture of IPTV services and diagnostics in these architectures. It then turns the attention to surveying encoding techniques that can serve as enablers for future IPTV especially Scalable Video Coding. Then, various IPTV distribution approaches including peer-to-peer and Content Distribution Networks are discussed. After that, major work on security and privacy concerns in IPTV is tackled. Finally, a discussion of the major work in wireless IPTV services is discussed with focus on LTE-based service offering. We believe such a survey will be very helpful for researchers who would like to educate themselves in the overall landscape of IPTV before digging deeper to address open research problems to bring IPTV closer to reality.

The impact of diversification with and without commodity bundling on corporate performance: An empirical analysis in Korea telecommunication markets

This study quantitatively analyzes how the diversification strategies of firms in the information communication technology (ICT) industry affect their existing businesses. Moreover, this study proposes a corporate strategy by comparing the outcomes of diversification with and without a bundling strategy. We perform an empirical analysis of firms that have diversified from high-speed Internet and wire telecommunication services to Internet protocol television service. For our analysis, we use a mixed multiple discrete-continuous extreme value model that reflects product selection and usage, and market simulation is conducted to access the effect of diversification. The results show that related diversification positively impacts corporate performance and that the impact of related diversification with commodity bundling is greater than that of related diversification without commodity bundling. On the basis of the results, this study suggests corporate strategy for diversification.

Proposed Assessment for Quality of Experience of Live IPTV in Home Environments

As the speed of networks that subscribers can use has greatly increased, demand for high-quality broadcast content, such as from Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and Video on Demand (VoD), is likewise increasing. Therefore, while broadcasters are increasing content and channels, they are striving to improve consumer quality of experience (QoE) to differentiate themselves from competitors, including by producing higher physical-quality content. Recently, subjective measurement methods have been internationally standardized as the most reliable approach for measuring and evaluating IPTV QoE. However, a majority of these methods are performed in experimental environments and are based on the extremely brief viewing period of approximately ten seconds using original reference videos. It is actually difficult to apply standard evaluation methods based on a ten-second viewing interval to assess real broadcast watching of IPTV or other services that involve a longer time (i.e., more than thirty minutes). In this paper, we therefore propose a method that accommodates actual viewing environments. Using the mean opinion score, we experimentally analyze the effects of evaluation interval changes under actual conditions in which IPTV service is provided. In addition, we propose improvements by applying the results into actual live broadcast IPTV service and by analyzing consumer service QoE.

IPTV channel switching delay reduction through predicting subscribers’ behaviors and preferences

This article aims at proposing a novel approach based on subscribers' behaviors and preferences in order to reduce channel switching delay in Internet protocol television (IPTV) over WiMAX networks. In the proposed scheme, first an algorithm is proposed for extracting users' preferences according to their behaviors so that the list of favorite channels is established for each user, where each channel is assigned a score. Having the channels clustered by the IPTV service providers, we propose two algorithms namely PGCP and P-PGCP based on which the favorite channels whose scores exceed a predefined threshold are pre-fetched in a low quality format. This procedure referred to as background channel transmission is the key idea in reducing channel switching latency. In PGCP, the dedicated bandwidth of pre-fetched channels is given to the highest score channels available at the top of each user's preference list. However in the p-PGCP, the popularity of the channels among all users is also taken into account in such a way that a channel which is popular among more users is assigned a higher priority of pre-fetching. Simulation results demonstrate the fact that the proposed two algorithms sufficiently take advantage of users' behavior patterns and is capable of reducing the channel switching time compared with existing approaches.

A Time-Topic Coupled LDA Model for IPTV User Behaviors

Internet protocol television (IPTV), the television services through the Internet, has recently gained increasing popularity. One key advantage of IPTV over the traditional terrestrial TV, satellite TV, and cable TV is that it makes the TV viewing experience more interactive and personalized. Many efforts have been made for delivering personalized IPTV services, of which understanding user preferences is the most critical. A key challenge in analyzing IPTV user behaviors is that multiple individuals may be associated with an IPTV account, thus making it difficult to identify individual users. We propose a novel time-topic coupled latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, which considers the topic of TV programs viewed as well as the timestamps of the viewing behaviors, in order to capture the inherent viewing patterns of individual users along the topic as well as the time dimensions. Based on the coupled LDA model, we further summarize the behavior patterns of IPTV users. We perform an in-depth study on several intrinsic characteristics of IPTV user activities by analyzing the real-world data collected from an operational nation-wide IPTV system in China and show that the proposed coupled LDA model is able to capture interesting viewing patterns.

Consumer perception of a new convergence product: A theoretical and empirical approach

The purpose of this study is to develop a new framework for the market analysis of new convergence products based on their attributes and consumer utility. We propose a theoretical model to analyze the effect of convergence products on existing markets, and categorize convergence products into three types and derive the consumer demand for each type. We empirically apply our theoretical model to analyze the Internet Protocol Television service in South Korea. This study might provide meaningful implications for the demand analysis of new convergence products in that it approaches the phenomenon of technological convergence from product and market perspectives.

Authentication and Key Management Based on Kerberos for M2M Mobile Open IPTV Security

Openness has been added to IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services in order for users not only to receive, but also to provide them. Open IPTV is expected to bring about great changes in the IPTV service area. Recently, mobility has also been added. However, because of its openness and IP network characteristics, security is one of the major issues hindering its commercialization. For IPTV, several security mechanisms for user authentication and content protection have been proposed to make the service reliable. However, these traditional security mechanisms cannot be adopted in the mobile IPTV area, because the security and system performance are influenced by numerous factors in the many-to-many environments. In our work, we propose a mechanism for secure user authentication and key distribution based on Kerberos for mobile open IPTV. Our proposal provides an efficient authentication process and the secure transmission of content among users, and further decreases the authentication time compared w...

Network centric QoS performance evaluation of IPTV transmission quality over VANETs

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) traffic streaming over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) challenge could be distinguished by the frequent VANETs topology change, paired with real-time streaming of IPTV traffic which requires high bandwidth and strict performance service quality. For VANETs to deliver better quality IPTV traffic, the network must satisfy the compelling Quality of Service (QoS) requirement of real-time traffic streaming, such as jitter, bandwidth, delay, and loss. There are numerous metrics defined in the literature for evaluating multimedia streaming traffic QoS such as: video quality metric, peak-signal-to-noise-ratio, moving picture quality metric and many more. However, these metrics relied upon the objective approach of quality evaluation that requires the original signal as reference, and cannot isolate the impact of network impairments on the video quality. Therefore, fail to provide any mapping between the network QoS parameters and the respective deteriorated quality of the multimedia traffic. Similarly, such procedures are not practically applicable to VANETs whose network characteristics make it practically impossible to access the reference video sequence. Hence, in this paper, we conduct an experiment to determine the feasibility of delivering a qualitative IPTV service over VANETs. We derived analytical model to quantify the IPTV QoS influencing parameters, where we establish relationships between the variables of each parameter and their impacts on the IPTV traffic QoS. Through extensive experiment, we evaluate the IPTV transmission QoS parameters, to assure a priority for handling bandwidth allocation, delay and loss control to a negligible level.

Quality of service management for IPTV services support in VANETs: a performance evaluation study

In order to deliver a qualitative Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), a quality of service (QoS) mechanism is needed to manage the allocate of network resources to the diverse IPTV application traffic demands. Unlike other mobile network, VANETs have certain unique characteristic that presents several difficulties in providing an effective QoS. Similarly, IPTV requires a constant stream for QoS which at the moment is quite difficult due to the inherent VANET characteristics. To provide an effective QoS that will meet the IPTV application service demands, VANETs, must satisfy the compelling real-time traffic streaming QoS requirement (i.e., minimum bandwidth allocation, packet loss and jitter). In this report, we evaluate via simulation the feasibility of deploying quality IPTV services over VANETs, by characterizing the association between the IPTV streaming quality determining factors (i.e., throughput, delay, loss, jitter) and the IPTV quality degradation, with respect to node density and node velocity. Furthermore, we used an objective QoS metric (Media-Delivery-Index) to identify, locate and address the loss or out-of-order packet. We outline how, using these information's can support in shaping network parameters to optimize service flows. The implementation assures a priority for handling IPTV traffic, such that maximise the usage of VANETs resources, and opens the possibility that loss and delay can be minimised to a degree that could guarantee quality IPTV service delivery among vehicle in a vehicular network system.

Availability evaluations for IPTV in VANETs with different types of access networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) represent a quickly emerging area of communication that offers a wide variety of possible applications, ranging from safety to entertainment. Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services as an entertainment application over VANETs is considered to play an important role in the future of intelligent transportation systems and vehicular infotainment systems. Quality of experience (QoE) has a strong impact when choosing adequate IPTV services for end users. Among QoE measures, TV Channel Availability (CA) is utmost important. In this work, we investigate the channel availability in IPTV services offered to vehicular users via different access network technologies. We focus on different traffic intensities and various number of TV channels and we predict the CA of TV channels and the Channel Blocking Probability (CBP) to be expected. The comprehensive simulation experiments for motor-highway scenarios are achieved by means of an own simulation tool which is based on a detailed IPTV user behavior model.

Realization of Communications-as-a-Service: IPTV Distribution Platform and a Network-Based IPTV Audience Measurement Scheme

With the advent of the next-generation networks (NGN) and the new technologies in the field of cloud computing, both individuals and enterprises are enjoying a great variety of networking and computing services with higher quality and lower cost than before. In this research, we identify that the concepts of NGN and cloud computing can be combined to create innovative services. Specifically, the distinguishing feature of NGN-services and underlying transport networks are unbundled-opens a new window for researchers to develop innovative cloud services in NGN. Accordingly, we demonstrate the concept of Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) in cloud computing by proposing an Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) distribution platform as a CaaS service. In this sense, enterprises wishing to become an IPTV service provider can lease the CaaS service and start their business with minimal upfront cost. Furthermore, we propose a network-based multicast IPTV audience measurement scheme as an add-on feature for the CaaS service. Compared with measurement schemes that collect data from the set-top boxes directly, the network-based scheme not only scales well when the audience is large, but also better preserves subscriber privacy. Besides, this scheme is truly NGN-conformant because the audience measurement is conducted inside the transport network, not in the IPTV service itself. We believe that our work may shed some light on the research of creating more innovative cloud-based NGN services in the future.

Integration of QoS Metrics, Rules and Semantic Uplift for Advanced IPTV Monitoring

Increasing and variable traffic demands due to triple play services pose significant Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) resource management challenges for service providers. Managing subscriber expectations via consolidated IPTV quality reporting will play a crucial role in guaranteeing return-on-investment for players in the increasingly competitive IPTV delivery ecosystem. We propose a fault diagnosis and problem isolation solution that addresses the IPTV monitoring challenge and recommends problem-specific remedial action. IPTV delivery-specific metrics are collected at various points in the delivery topology, the residential gateway and the Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer through to the video Head-End. They are then pre-processed using new metric rules. A semantic uplift engine takes these raw metric logs; it then transforms them into World Wide Web Consortium's standard Resource Description Framework for knowledge representation and annotates them with expert knowledge from the IPTV domain. This system is then integrated with a monitoring visualization framework that displays monitoring events, alarms, and recommends solutions. A suite of IPTV fault scenarios is presented and used to evaluate the feasibility of the solution. We demonstrate that professional service providers can provide timely reports on the quality of IPTV service delivery using this system.

A QoS Provisioning Mechanism of Real-Time Wireless USB Transfers for Smart HDTV Multimedia Services

Wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) is the USB technology merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC. WUSB can be applied to wireless personal area network applications as well as PAN applications like wired USB. However the current WUSB protocol can't provide resource allocation scheme to respond to changes of available resource as well as resource allocation scheme for saturated wireless channel. This problem causes the critical problems in QoS provisioning to real-time multimedia streams such as high definition television, since multimedia application generate high data rates and can easily saturate the bandwidth even at the rates provided by Ultra wide-band transmissions. Therefore, we propose resource allocation scheme for WUSB transfers to respond to changes of available resource as well as resource allocation scheme for saturated WUSB channel. And its performance is evaluated under an internet protocol television service scenario in wireless home networks.

The future of sports delivery in Australia NBN multicast, IPTV and the role of the ISPs

Where lucrative media rights deals for sports content currently lie primarily with pay TV and free to air (FTA) broadcasters, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) entering the content delivery market through partners such as Fetch TV may be better placed to compete for distribution rights to sporting and other live events. In response to this shifting environment this paper outlines the technological capacities of NBN-based multicast Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and examines public comment and interview data from ISPs, sports organisations and NBN Co. regarding their intentions for IPTV delivery. This paper begins with the assumption that diversity in these emerging media forms remains important as ISPs enter the media content market. We demonstrate, however, that despite the emergence of NBN-based technologies, diversity in sports content distribution cannot be assumed. The paper points toward the important role that regulators, such as the ACCC, have in maintaining diversity and competition in IPTV services.

The future of sports delivery in Australia NBN multicast, IPTV and the role of the ISPs

Where lucrative media rights deals for sports content currently lie primarily with pay TV and free to air (FTA) broadcasters, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) entering the content delivery market through partners such as Fetch TV may be better placed to compete for distribution rights to sporting and other live events. In response to this shifting environment this paper outlines the technological capacities of NBN-based multicast Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and examines public comment and interview data from ISPs, sports organisations and NBN Co. regarding their intentions for IPTV delivery. This paper begins with the assumption that diversity in these emerging media forms remains important as ISPs enter the media content market. We demonstrate, however, that despite the emergence of NBN-based technologies, diversity in sports content distribution cannot be assumed. The paper points toward the important role that regulators, such as the ACCC, have in maintaining diversity and competition in IPTV services.

The future of sports delivery in Australia: NBN multicast, IPTV and the role of the ISPs

Where lucrative media rights deals for sports content currently lie primarily with pay TV and free to air (FTA) broadcasters, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) entering the content delivery market through partners such as Fetch TV may be better placed to compete for distribution rights to sporting and other live events. In response to this shifting environment this paper outlines the technological capacities of NBN-based multicast Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and examines public comment and interview data from ISPs, sports organisations and NBN Co. regarding their intentions for IPTV delivery. This paper begins with the assumption that diversity in these emerging media forms remains important as ISPs enter the media content market. We demonstrate, however, that despite the emergence of NBN-based technologies, diversity in sports content distribution cannot be assumed. The paper points toward the important role that regulators, such as the ACCC, have in maintaining diversity and competition in IPTV services.

A consumer value analysis of mobile internet protocol television based on a means-end chain theory

With the rise of the 4G technology, TV or video services based on mobile devices have received increasing attention from consumers. Using means-end chain theory, this study examines the cognitive structure of mobile internet protocol television (IPTV) users. Here, the cognitive structure refers to the attribute–consequence–value linkage that consumers consider as important in mobile IPTV services. The study classifies consumers based on two dimensions (their gender and occupation) and presents hierarchical value maps of mobile IPTV services. For this, the study collects data on 112 potential users of mobile IPTV services by using the association pattern technique. The results indicate as the representative cognitive structure of men and students; as that of women; and as that of office workers.

A Collaborative and Scalable Platform for On-Demand IPTV Services

As a promising standard of television, Internet protocol television (IPTV) gains increasing popularity with its on-demand services. However, supporting scalable on-demand IPTV services remains to be an important challenge. Existing IPTV architecture dedicates a regional station to serve subscribers in the respective region regardless of temporal and spatial dynamics in service demand. This may cause significant imbalance of resource utilization and service provisioning delay among stations, especially with increasing subscribers and service catalog. In this paper, we propose CiTV, a collaborative Internet TV service platform that achieves efficient and scalable IPTV service delivery through interstation collaboration. First, CiTV employs a novel request dispatching algorithm that enables stations to autonomously dispatch requests among themselves and achieves low per-view cost and load variance at the same time. Second, CiTV also leverages a distributed content placement algorithm to globally optimize content utilization at multistation level, which is important for deployment scalability. Last but not the least, CiTV also ensures service delivery quality and efficiency through fine-grained collaboration scope control. We perform both theoretical and empirical analysis of CiTV. Our experiment results suggest that CiTV significantly improves the scalability of on-demand IPTV services for the existing IPTV architecture.

Integrated multicast routing algorithms considering traffic engineering for broadband IPTV services

Abstract With the rapid growth of broadband network deployment and multimedia streaming development, Internet protocol (IP) multicast networks have become a delivery mechanism for Internet protocol television (IPTV). IPTV provides a two-way interactive service to the viewers, which generates the path request for IP multicast network. Thus, it is essential to evaluate the path rejection probability accurately and further to reduce it. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic multicast routing algorithm for broadband IPTV services and apply it to three legacy algorithms. These integrated multicast routing algorithms support the minimum cost and the traffic engineering features, in order to maximize the acceptance rate for bandwidth constraint path request under IPTV service environments. Furthermore, we compare their network performances in terms of the acceptance rate and delay by experimental simulations. The simulation result gives us that the nearest node first Dijkstra algorithm can be the optimal solution of multicast connection for IPTV service delivery.

Improving IPTV Forwarding Masechanism in IEEE 802.16j MMR Networks Based on Aggregation

Internet protocol television (IPTV) service depends on the network quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth of the broadband service provider. IEEE 802.16j mobile multihop relay Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access networks have the opportunity to offer high bandwidth capacity by introducing relay stations. However, to actually satisfy QoS requirements for offering IPTV services (HDTV, SDTV, Web TV, and mobile TV) for heterogeneous users’ requests, providers must use a video server for each IPTV service type, which increases the network load, especially bandwidth consumption and forwarding time. In this paper, we present a solution for forwarding IPTV video streaming to diverse subscribers via an 802.16j broadband wireless access network. In particular, we propose a new multicast tree construction and aggregation mechanism based on the unique property of prime numbers. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme reduces both bandwidth consumption and forwarding time.