Towards Personalized TV for Concurrent Use: Unlocking the Potential of IMS-Based IPTV

Television (TV) is getting more personal. It went from a passive broadcast medium without any form of personalization or user identification, to subscription TV, interactive TV and now to IPTV, featuring an integrated return channel. IMS-based IPTV is a good example of a personalised IPTV architecture, featuring advanced identity management. This article studies a next step in the personalization of the television experience, namely concurrent use of TV services. That is, multiple users are using the same television set at the same or different times, where each user has a personalized interaction with the service and content. Our analysis of use cases for IMS-based IPTV shows that current architectures do not take this concept of concurrent use into account. We demonstrate that the combination of concurrent use and personalized TV services yields interesting and viable use cases in the areas of interactive television game shows, personalized electronic program guides and – channel lists, and other. Finally, an analysis of the IMS-based IPTV architecture shows that it has all the ingredients to implement these new concurrent TV use cases, and that the main challenges will be in the area of usability. The article concludes that personalization and concurrency are not contradictory for television services, neither from a use case perspective, nor technologically.