Delivering Services to Residential Appliances by Utilizing Remote Resource Awareness

Service providers are nowadays offering a variety of services, and in particular multimedia content delivery. Besides, consumer appliances are increasingly becoming digitalized including support for communication networks. However, it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to use these services with standard consumer appliances, such as TV and media player devices. Rather, usage is often restricted so that they can only be accessed through web browsers from PCs, mobile phones and similar terminals. This is unfortunate, because dedicated consumer appliances are often better suited to handle the content and thereby give consumers a better experience. Within this paper, three design approaches that support such services are described and compared, along with a prototype that shows this concept.