Architecture for the support of the video on demand service for virtual academic communities on IPTV

This paper presents an architecture that supports Academic Virtual Communities (AVC) in IPTV environment over the VoD scheme. AVC allows people to build knowledge through the intensive use of the information and communication technologies. Based on this fact, the architecture presented here supports the display of pre-selected academic television contents from a VoD catalog. Additionally, it allows the access to other services (associated and not associated to the content), those are abstracted from the Web 2.0, for example: wikis, blogs and chat. They will provide a suitable environment to promote the collaborative learning. In addition, the architecture presented here is an effective solution to support educative process in one of the most used scenarios in IPTV environments.