---

The lines between communication services are getting blurrier every day thanks to the internet. Some of us do phone calls (or video calls) over Skype or through other VoIP providers and those of us who don’t still dial transatlantic calls might not know it but we actually go over IP some of the way in-between these continents. The same is happening for television, which eventually transitions to IP service.

As we move to a world where service providers offer triple-play and quad-play packages (television, phone, internet and mobile), isn’t it only reasonable to assume that they will try to merge these “products” into a single internal architecture? And if so, then this architecture should probably be IMS.

Why? Because this is what all of the standards organizations dealing with mobile, fixed and IPTV have selected.

• ETSI TISPAN has worked for the last two years to include IPTV into IMS.
• The 3GPP is currently working in turning IMS into a digital entertainment platform in their release 8.

That said, what does IPTV stands to gain from adopting IMS? Here’s my list of 7 reasons for this adoption.

1. IPTV is a service

First and foremost, IPTV is a service, or a set of services. IMS is a network architecture that enables the creation and deployment of services. As such, a lot of the magic required in the underlying protocols and infrastructure are already taken care of by IMS and IPTV can only gain from these.

2. Quality of Service in a multi-service domain

As service providers offer triple-play or quad-play packages over a single broadband connection to the home, there is a need to manage the data sent over the connection to allow for multiple services to co-exist. Having your important phone call drop in quality because your son is watching his favorite movie isn’t going to help.

If an operator deploys IPTV and an additional service over the same network, he will either need to provide each of these services a static amount of bandwidth, or be able to negotiate network usage dynamically - the latter option is the obvious winner here, and what better way to do that than with IMS, which offers a built-in quality of service mechanism that takes multiple services and dynamic network conditions into account.

3. Network topology support

You can never know what lies in the network. In the past year I’ve met several customers who plan to deploy video telephony services through IP set-top boxes. Each time they are approached by a service provider, the network topology is different. Some operators have a “flat” network, where to them, set-top boxes are located in the same domain, behind a single firewall, while others have multiple firewalls spread around their network.

To cater to the needs of each means finding solutions for NAT and firewall traversal.

IMS already has this one covered, with aspects of NAT traversal and inter-domain communication built into the solution.

4. Security and authentication

The ability to secure and authenticate the users of IPTV service is easy to grasp. The best example of this can be found on Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog, where he recounts the story of the Black Sunday Hack. To keep it short, suffice to say that in that case, around 100,000 people got free content from DirecTV.

As we find ourselves moving forward towards IPTV, it will be essential to put safeguards in place - not only for the operators to make their money from subscriptions and pay per view content, but also for us to be confident that we’re paying only for our content - and not for content others receive by piggybacking our account.

5. Users and services profiles and properties

Operators in the triple-play and quad-play domain need to hold multiple user databases - one for their TV subscription, the other on their phone line, a third for their internet connection and another for their mobile phone bills.

Problem is - it’s the same person. If the issue was only duplication of data, then there’s no big deal here, but it’s a lot more than that. Operators in today’s world need to build the most accurate profile of their users - their habits, wants and needs. By having better profiles for users, they can provide better service.

Having a single, standardized database, which is based on the cellular world model with additions and tweaks to meet IPTV’s special needs, can be of great value to service providers.

6. Billing

As with everything else, operators are concerned about making money, which comes down to the billing system they use and how flexible it is.

IMS as an architecture started from the 3GPP to cater to the needs of mobile operators. As such, billing is built into it, with the ability to handle prepaid, pay as you go, subscription and any other kind of option. IPTV can utilize this same system and provide a platform for operators to create new services and bill for them as they see fit.

Single billing is not the only reason though. The same is also applicable to CRM, provisioning, performance management and any other similar activity between services.

7. Service blending

The TV is the center of our homes. It sits in our living room, and in some cases in each and every room we have. By having IPTV work over IMS, there is the ability to provide multiple services mashed up to each other - similar to the successful mashups that are being done over the internet. Allowing that will give more value to users, and will increase the revenue for the operator.

Bonus reason

If you look at today’s triple-play service providers, their IPTV and VoIP services usually operate on different networks. This requires higher expenses compared to a single network architecture that can serve multiple services. From a pure cost point of view, merging everything to a single network plays in favor of IPTV, and that can be done using IMS.

Returning to the start, IPTV is a set of services. IMS is a platform to create and manage services. They are a perfect match. Using IMS instead of trying to build a standardized interface for managing IPTV and causing duplications seems like the right choice, especially when moving to a triple-play or a quad-play service provider world.