The use of high-speed multimedia technologies such as MPEG-based interactive Videoconferencing and IPTV for delivering Television content over the Internet is becoming increasingly common. With commercial vendors and content providers envisioning products and services for delivering audiovisual content equipped with greater user-control and higher resolutions, there has arisen a significant dem...

One of the biggest problems of the IPTV providers is to offer enough quality of experience (QoE) to their customers. The minimum bandwidth in the access network required to provide IPTV services, jointly with the necessity to guarantee the QoE to the customers, creates the need for new type of algorithms to satisfy the network requirements. Apart from the parameters that depend on the applicati...

Virtualized cloud-based services can take advantage of statistical multiplexing across applications to yield significant cost savings to the operator. In this paper, we seek to lower a provider’s costs of real-time IPTV services through a virtualized IPTV architecture and through intelligent time shifting of service delivery. We take advantage of the differences in the deadlines associated with...

Telecommunications companies are investing in ways to offer its customers triple-play services and some of them are starting to think about integration with mobile services. This means that there is a convergence at the network for IP (Internet Protocol), to offer the different services. In an ALL-IP network, personalized and interactive services can be provided very easily. IPTV is the technol...

Internet Protocol Television is defined as a multimedia service delivered over IP-based networks supporting quality of service (QoS), quality of experience (QoE), security, interactivity, and reliability. This service is rapidly expanding to both wireless and mobile networks through mobile devices. This trend demands a seamless IPTV service architecture for those mobile devices in heterogeneous...

In Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) broadcasting, service providers charge subscription fee by scrambling the program in Conditional Access System (CAS). This avoids unauthorized users to receive the programs. A smart card (CA card) is used to decrypt the Control Words (CWs) and transfer them back to Set-Top Box (STB) in order to descramble the scrambled program. This paper presents a secure...

Fernando M.V. Ramos∗, Fei Song∗†, Pablo Rodriguez‡, Richard Gibbens∗, Jon Crowcroft∗, Ian H. White∗ ∗University of Cambridge †Beijing Jiaotong University ‡Telefonica Research, Barcelona

It is now common for IPTV systems attracting millions of users to be based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. In such systems, each channel is typically associated with one P2P overlay network connecting the users. This significantly enhances the user experience by relieving the source from dealing with all connections. Yet, the joining process resulting in a peer to be integrated in channel...

The end user experience of service quality is critical to the success of a service provider’s IPTV deployment program. A key element involved in validating IPTV quality of experience (QoE) is how quickly and reliably users can change TV channels, often referred to as channel zapping. Currently there is no knowledge about the explicit relation between zapping time and the user perceived quality ...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) IPTV applications have increasingly been considered as a potential approach to online broadcasting. Recently, many applications such as PPlive, PPStream, and Sopcast have been deployed to deliver live streaming via P2P. One of the latest systems is Joost, which can deliver both Video-on-Demand and RealTime services. Measuring and characterizing this application in terms of si...