Event-driven interactivity in IPTV

Abstract: As broadcast television has developed from analogue transmission over the air to digital transmission over cable and satellite, and today over IP networks, many new challenges as well as opportunities to develop new services has surfaced. This thesis will provide an overview of the IPTV technology with a focus on interactive services, as well as describe a prototype that has been developed to illustrate how interactivity could be implemented. It was observed that sports broadcasting was a good candidate to present additional interactive content, due to the wealth of material usually available outside of the broadcast itself, such as statistics. A prototype has been developed at TeliaSonera, an IPTV provider with roughly 400.000 customers, as a part of the Next Generation Media project at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). The prototype has been integrated into the existing user interface to provide management of sports highlights, enabling users to view highlights in live matches on several channels at once, without worrying about missing any of the action, even if it happens on a channel they are not currently watching. Interest has also been shown from a third party, using the developed framework for delivering events to the set-top box, and the existing code was modified to allow various types of events to be received, allowing the user to interact with the television content in different ways.