An Approach to the Implementation of Web TV Architecture with Interactive Services

Abstract An approach of a functional architecture that allows support to all current and future IPTV systems based on audiovisual content and interactive services is explained in this paper. New technologies and advances in mobile terminals, DTT, entertainment centers or next-generation televisions have made to reach a large population and offer a completely customized interactive experience to the user, unlike traditional TV. This architecture can manage all information concerning the user, the video content, the signal delivering to the end user as well as support for interactive services. The interactive services are able to provide a fully personalized user experience, as different agents that show all information related to the audiovisual content which is playing. The catalog of interactive services may be as wide as you like. Importantly, the presented platform in this paper covers all anticipated needs for the coming years in the IPTV sector, but due to this, it is a totally open system, highly modularized, it is possible to add new subsystems, as a result, the integration should be immediate. This is possible because the development based on interfaces has been followed to its specification. It has been defined an architecture and methods for implementing interactive services associated to the multimedia content. 1. Introduction The aim of this work is to achieve a platform for the dissemination of visual content through the Internet and the integration of interactive services on audiovisual content. The potential of the network in the field of television is a sector that is booming nowadays. Increasingly, with the inclusion in the market of next-generation televisions with Internet connection, mobile devices with multimedia capabilities or the PC itself, there are enough elements that allow us to bring television to a new level: "the interactive television”. However, the main problem underlying this new TV concept is the lack of standardized architectures. So far, every producer, distributor or television station has its own architecture in its systems, with the limitation that this causes when the visual content covers all intermediaries before reaching the viewer itself. We must not forget that the proposed architecture will be useful for all types of playback platforms, i.e. not only be limited to PCs, but next-generation TVs with Internet connection, mobile devices and Tablet PCs can access to the reproduction of audiovisual contents and all services that platform offers from anywhere. The communication channel on which we will build will be the Internet, so that the platform will not only be able to deliver the content, but to give it a new dimension to interactive services. An interactive service is simply an application of information relating to the audiovisual content being offered, so the user not only can see audiovisual content (as currently offered by television stations), but to interact with the system in a totally personalized. In addition, taking advantage of features that Internet offers us, among many other applications which follow, you may identify the user and the audiovisual content being played. So that we can make a profile of preferences based on the nature of the contents that users plays habitually. With the arrival of IPTV and video on-demand (VoD) on Internet appears the possibility of integrate services over multimedia content. We have all the resources of the Web and we can exploit the possibilities of an Internet connection. All this requires a robust architecture and extensive enough to support playback of audiovisual content and interactive services to the user. 2. Related Work The concept of IPTV is relatively new, as it was in 2003 when France Telecom launched its first product based on this technology. Months later, in April 2004, Deutsche Telecom in Germany did the same. However, the company deserves special mention Fastweb, which unlike its predecessors, is not a telecom company but from IT, which offers a network television on a much larger capacity than the previous, so audiovisual content not only has a higher quality, but can be joined to such content information, without this compromise the correct reception of multimedia content. From 2005 [8] were numerous telecommunications companies provide their infrastructure services based on IPTV. However, to this day the impact of these services has not been too high in the community of users. This was due mainly to the disadvantage of the display of video content available on mobile terminals, the speed of telephone networks to send data (3G) and especially with little or no innovation in services associated with the audiovisual content [5, 7]. As we will see out below, is An approach to the implementation of web TV architecture with interactive services Antonio M. Bellido, Miguel Ángel Álvarez, Luis Miguel Soria, Juan Antonio Ortega, Jesús Torres Dep. de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Sevilla {antonio.bellido, migalvcon, lsoriamo}@gmail.com, {jortega, jtorres}@us.es PRODUCER SERVICE PROVIDER SERVICE PLATFORM NETWORK PROVIDER CORE SYSTEM U S E R WEB P R E S E N T A T I O N LAYER Figure 2: IPTV Modules Diagram precisely the latter that we will solve our architecture, multimedia systems [2]. However, from 2009 with the birth and the introduction of DTT in a massive, IPTV has experienced a breakthrough. Especially in IMS-based systems, where corporations have invested a great effort [4, 6]. Today there are two systems that are the most extended in Europe: DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial) and IPTV. There are more systems like DVB-S (Satellite), DBV-H (Handheld), but the most common are DVB-T and IPTV. All of them are included in the DVB standard. Maybe for its possibilities IPTV would be the most extended in the future. Outside Europe TV systems are similar, for example, in North America is Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) and in Japan Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) defines the family like DVB in Europe and it defines Internet data connections too. The most extended systems are shown in figure 1. Nowadays there are some companies all over the world that offer IP television (IPTV). These companies serve IPTV signal through HTTP protocol. The signal is received by a gateway device and it is connected to a set top box (STB) device. These STB devices receive digital TV signal encapsulated in an IP datagram and provide it to the TV. In other words, STBs use HTTP protocol. TV of the future will be an Interactive TV and users will be a part of which they are watching. The basis of this future TV are now establishing with the possibilities of IP Television. Now is time to give it interactivity through interactive services. 3. IPTV Architecture Figure 2 shows the modules diagram of IPTV architecture developed. These general modules contain the different functional elements. The system has seven different modules representing each of the roles that participate in the system. The producer module will be responsible for providing audiovisual content and involve interactive content. We should clarify that the same audiovisual content may have several associated interactive services, even in the same time. Secondly, the network provider module will provide the infrastructure for the delivery of audiovisual content to the user. This is reduced to a communication channel between the system and the end user via the Internet. Then, it appears the service platform module, which provides the necessary security layer to control access to the platform and audiovisual content. The service provider module could be considered the main module of the platform, because supports all the functionality that the core module later orchestrated to provide a full IPTV services, safe, functional and attractive to the user. The presentation layer module provides to the end user the system interface. The user module interacts with the user and could save information about his habits and preferences. Inside these modules are the functional entities. It is not the objective of this paper to see in details all of these functional entities because it is an approach to the architecture. However, we'll see what entities make up the modules without going into details of their functions. The producer module contains the following entities: Audiovisual Content Metadata, Interactive Content Metadata, IPTV Services Module and IPTV Services Profile. The service provider module these ones: Service Access Authorization, Events Purchase, Authentication and Session Management, Billing and Statistics and Audience Control. The core system contains: IPTV Control. In the service platform are the Electronic Program Guide (EPG), Content management and Service keys and Security Assurance Layer modules. The network provider module includes Content Delivery Module and Transport Module. And finally Web Presentation Layer and User modules contain only one functional entity with its same name. See Figure 4. 4. Interactive Services In our work we define the interactive services as services included in the IPTV platform and with which users can interact in some way. We will center our objective in interactive services that have some relationship with the media content (music or video) that users are listening or watching because they are Figure 1: most extended digital TV systems 84 more complete. In that case you have to take into account what are users watching on their TVs. We can say that other type of services are more independent and with Internet possibilities more easy to implement. Those last services are the most common services actually and there is no interactivity between video content, those services and users. Attending to this, we can find two types of interactive services:  Synchronized interactive services are linked to a particular program or its contents, and come in various forms.  Permanent interactive services are those that the consumer can find continuously in the broadcast. You can interact with them regardless of programming. Our interactive services solutions will be new independent layers integrable and synchronized with IPTV signal and that allow interactivity with users. We are more interested in Synchronized interactive services in this paper. Content signal can be transmitted as broadcast content to allow providers broadcast video or audio through a TV channel. In this case all users are watching the same content in an instant of time. Other way is to transmit content as video on demand (VoD). In this case each user can watch its favorite program when he wants. Users can advance, pause or rewind content and watch it once again while content is available in the system. With that in mind we have to solve some problems related to the type of content transmission:  In the first case, if content transmission is in broadcast type, interactive services can be programmed at the instant of time when the content is linked to it and customize the interactive service to user is more difficult to implement and more easily to the content (all users receive the same interactive service).  In the second case, if content transmission is video on demand type, each user have to do a request to watch the multimedia content. System “knows” who is requesting which multimedia content and in what instant of time is doing it. So system can adapt interactive services to user preferences using statistical methods or taking into account his preferences. 5. Technique Description Once the concepts related to interactive services and its use in multimedia web applications has been described, in this section has been described how has been developed them to integrate with audiovisual content. These interactive services which are accompanying audiovisual content have been deployed as web services that offer specific functionality and allows the interaction of the web application via HTTP protocol. This restriction is imposed to comply that the system would be multiplatform. In figure 3 we show the modules that have been developed to integrate interactive service with audiovisual content. Interactive services have been integrated based on two types of audiovisual content. These types differ in the transmission mode. On one side we have audiovisual content broadcasting to all users (Streaming Multicast) and another that will be broadcasted on demand (Video on Demand – VoD):  Streaming Multicast: this kind of audiovisual content is unique, shared by all users and displayed at the same time. An example of this type is the current TV, which offers programming for all viewers. With this type of audiovisual content, we move the TV to devices connected to the network.  Video on Demand – VoD: this type of audiovisual content is on demand and it can be viewed at any time. In addition, it allows to control the audiovisual content for add functionality to pause, forward and backward. The control flow between audiovisual content, interactive service and users is shown in figure 5. The control flow starts with the broadcasting of audiovisual content. After this first step, the system collects through IPTV Control Module all the metadata related with interactive services including in the audiovisual content. During broadcast, the system integrates the interactive service in the web application. The instant of time when the system must integrate, it is determined by the properties specified in the metadata. The user can use the interactive service while it is visible. In order to do this, the IPTV Services Module is responsible for deploying the necessary web service to make use of it. These series of actions are repeated while there are interactive services during the broadcast of audiovisual content. 6. Applications Due to the accessibility of interactive services through the HTTP protocol, it can be used in many applications depending on the nature of the own service. In our case, we have implemented some interactive services like: Figure 3: interactive services modules 85  Televote: in this interactive service users can vote for an option proposed in the multimedia content using the interactive service.  Purchase: users can directly buy some product announced in the multimedia content or related to it. Users can do shopping easily.  Download: users can download some multimedia content or general file in their own devices. That is much useful in web TV environments. Other application could be advertising. Companies can offer customized advertising through interactive services depending on the multimedia content, what kind of users are watching the TV, time of broadcast, number of users, etc. Even companies can merge various options. These interactive services are available for devices with connectivity to the Internet. Currently, the new TVs include widgets that allow users to interact with some services like weather, YouTube, news, etc. It is very easy to integrate our interactive services with these TV by adapting them to widgets. So it's a good start to extend the functionality of these TVs. The growth performance of mobile devices makes us think that these kinds of devices are also strong candidates to use interactive services. These devices also use widgets and nowadays Figure 4: IPTV System’s Architecture Figure 5: interactive services flow diagram 86 almost all of them are permanently connected to Internet thanks to the new tariffs offered by mobile operators. 7. Conclusions In this work has been developed an architecture which can perform all the process of emission of audiovisual content. In addition, the architecture has given support to certain applications associated with the audiovisual content as interactive services. These applications will take the revolution to the television industry. The interactive content has been integrated into the own process of generation of audiovisual content. The system that our research group has developed from the architecture described in this paper shows that architecture is fully functional and viable for the development of all types of applications based on transmission of audiovisual content. The proposed architecture also models the entire flow of content from its generation by the producer to its channel broadcast through television or VoD. This modeling allows establishing a sequence of actions to facilitate the work of emission and broadcasting of content. 8. Acknowledgments This research is supported by the MCI I+D project ARTEMISA (TIN2009-14378-C02-01). 9. 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