Jürgen Heiles

Standardization Activities for IPTV Set-Top Box Remote Management

IPTV services are gaining widespread use, requiring service providers to have effective methods for remotely configuring and managing IPTV set-top boxes (STBs). Solutions for such remote management are becoming standards-based. This article examines published specifications and ongoing activities on IPTV STB remote management in four standards organizations: the Broadband Forum, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project, the Open IPTV Forum, and the Alliance for Telecommunication Industry Solutions IPTV Interoperability Forum. The authors compare the protocol and data model definitions, investigate interoperability test events, and comment on possible future directions for standardization.

DVB-IPTV content download services--overview and use cases

IPTV services have been widely deployed by network operators around the world over the last years. However, real-time streaming of Linear TV and Video-on-Demand (VoD) offerings, especially in High Definition quality, still puts a high burden on the network and content servers concerning bandwidth, Quality-of-Service, processing performance and scalability if 100.000s of users have to be supported simultaneously. While multicast delivery can cope with some of these problems for Linear TV services, the unicast VoD services cannot take advantage of that and especially the request for on-demand content is expected to substantially grow in the future. With the introduction of Content Download Services (CDSs), operators have the option to provide IPTV services in innovative ways: They can provide high-quality video services to users with limited access bandwidth, offload the streaming request for blockbuster movies at peak times from the VoD servers or provided personalized advertisements for insertion into a live program event in advance to the users end device. The Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) Project has recently finalized its CDS specification within its IPTV specification efforts. DVB CDS supports push and pull delivery models with unicast, multicast and peer-to-peer distribution in order to enable various business models and use cases. In this work we introduce the specified technology and map it to example use cases and business models.