Towards personalized TV for concurrent use; challenges and opportunities for IMS-based IPTV

As TV is becoming increasingly personalized, its focus has become more and more on single individual users. In this article we propose a new form of personalized TV services; personalized TV services for multiple concurrent users of the same television. We will present a number of novel use cases that fall in this category. IMS-based IPTV seems a good architecture to implement these new services on since it is based around an established service oriented infrastructure called IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) which features an advanced identity management framework. We will demonstrate that up until now, concurrent use has not been taken into account in IMS-based IPTV. This results in a number of challenges, particularly in the areas of identification and authentication. With a new authentication method we will present in this article, called RFID Digest, we introduce a possible solution to these issues. This new authentication method is integrated in a multi-user TV prototype that allows multiple users to simultaneously enjoy personalized services together on the same TV. The article concludes that the area of personalization for concurrent use offers possibilities for new TV services to distinguish themselves.