The future of IPTV

As more and more content migrates to the Internet, “personal” video choices are becoming the norm not the exception. The impact of Internet content and IP-based video distribution is still difficult to evaluate. However, there is obviously no turning back as this content pervades the home and the community. Driven in large part by the near-ubiquitous IP-based communication services, the TV experience has been extended over the years to embrace many of the same ancillary services provided by web applications. This new TV promises to deliver a world of content and services to “any device, anywhere, anytime.” This article addresses the architecture, the value chain and the technical and business challenges of implementing this new connected mobile and social TV experience. To put the architecture into a context, this article also presents a use case of the distributed community Digital Video Recorder (DVR) as an implementation of this vision.