Internet Protocol Television (IPTV): Architecture, Trends, and Challenges

Internet protocol television (IPTV), a technology that delivers video content over a network that uses the IP networking protocol, has been receiving a lot of attention over the last couple of years. The increasing interest in IPTV is being driven by remarkable advances in digital technologies and consumer electronic devices, broadband networking technologies, Web services, as well as more entertainment demands (enabled by decreasing costs of hardware and software technologies) from both consumers and content providers. In this paper, we briefly discuss IPTV standardization initiatives and present the design of both next-generation network (NGN)-based and non-NGN-based architectures that have been recently proposed to enable the deployment of IPTV. In addition, we describe the challenges and solutions associated with mobile IPTV and peer-to-peer IPTV systems. We Anally present some IPTV trends and identify some of the IPTV challenges that must be addressed to enable the ubiquitous deployment and adoption of IPTV.