IPTV data reduction strategy to measure real users’ behaviours

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe digital IPTV service has evolved in terms of features, technology and accessibility of their contents. However, the rapid evolution of features and services has brought a more complex offering to customers, which often are not enjoyed or even perceived. Therefore, it is important to measure the real advantage of those features and understand how they are used by customers. In this work, we present a strategy that deals directly with the real IPTV data, which result from the interaction actions with the set-top boxes by customers. But this data has a very low granularity level, which is complex and difficult to interpret. The approach is to transform the clicking actions to a more conceptual and representative level of the running activities. Furthermore, there is a significant reduction in the data cardinality, enhanced in terms of information quality. More than a transformation, this approach aims to be iterative, where at each level, we achieve a more accurate information, in order to characterize a particular behaviour. As experimental results, we present some application areas regarding the main offered features in this digital service. In particular, is made a study about zapping behaviour, and also an evaluation about DVR service usage. It is also discussed the possibility to integrate the strategy devised in a particular carrier, aiming to analyse the consumption rate of their services, in order to adjust them to customer real usage profile, and also to study the feasibility of new services introduction

Keyframe insertion : enabling low-latency random access and packet loss repair

From a video coding perspective, there are two challenges when performing live video distribution over error-prone networks, such as wireless networks: random access and packet loss repair. There is a scarceness of solutions that do not impact steady-state usage and users with reliable connections. The proposed solution minimizes this impact by complementing a compression-efficient video stream with a companion stream solely consisting of keyframes. Although the core idea is not new, this paper is the first work to provide restrictions and modifications necessary to make this idea work using the High-Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC) compression standard. Additionally, through thorough quantification, insight is provided on how to provide low-latency fast channel switching capabilities and error recovery at low quality impact, i.e., less than 0.94 average Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) score decrease. Finally, worst-case drift artifacts are described and visualized such that the reader gets an overall picture of using the keyframe insertion technique

Broadcasting services amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006 and related bills

To help better explore the potential implications associated with the proposed legislation, we conducted a survey of 919 WA television viewers drawing from our TV Panel of 3000 viewers. Our panel has been recruited from a variety of sources including through lists acquired through marketing research firms, as well as direct mail and newspaper advertising recruitment drives. In many ways, our panel is better informed regarding future possibilities because they participate in regular studies where such scenarios are tested. In this way, the panel is better positioned to understand potential futures

Contribution to quality of user experience provision over wireless networks

The widespread expansion of wireless networks has brought new attractive possibilities to end users. In addition to the mobility capabilities provided by unwired devices, it is worth remarking the easy configuration process that a user has to follow to gain connectivity through a wireless network. Furthermore, the increasing bandwidth provided by the IEEE 802.11 family has made possible accessing to high-demanding services such as multimedia communications. Multimedia traffic has unique characteristics that make it greatly vulnerable against network impairments, such as packet losses, delay, or jitter. Voice over IP (VoIP) communications, video-conference, video-streaming, etc., are examples of these high-demanding services that need to meet very strict requirements in order to be served with acceptable levels of quality. Accomplishing these tough requirements will become extremely important during the next years, taking into account that consumer video traffic will be the predominant traffic in the Internet during the next years. In wired systems, these requirements are achieved by using Quality of Service (QoS) techniques, such as Differentiated Services (DiffServ), traffic engineering, etc. However, employing these methodologies in wireless networks is not that simple as many other factors impact on the quality of the provided service, e.g., fading, interferences, etc. Focusing on the IEEE 802.11g standard, which is the most extended technology for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), it defines two different architecture schemes. On one hand, the infrastructure mode consists of a central point, which manages the network, assuming network controlling tasks such as IP assignment, routing, accessing security, etc. The rest of the nodes composing the network act as hosts, i.e., they send and receive traffic through the central point. On the other hand, the IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc configuration mode is less extended than the infrastructure one. Under this scheme, there is not a central point in the network, but all the nodes composing the network assume both host and router roles, which permits the quick deployment of a network without a pre-existent infrastructure. This type of networks, so called Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), presents interesting characteristics for situations when the fast deployment of a communication system is needed, e.g., tactics networks, disaster events, or temporary networks. The benefits provided by MANETs are varied, including high mobility possibilities provided to the nodes, network coverage extension, or network reliability avoiding single points of failure. The dynamic nature of these networks makes the nodes to react to topology changes as fast as possible. Moreover, as aforementioned, the transmission of multimedia traffic entails real-time constraints, necessary to provide these services with acceptable levels of quality. For those reasons, efficient routing protocols are needed, capable of providing enough reliability to the network and with the minimum impact to the quality of the service flowing through the nodes. Regarding quality measurements, the current trend is estimating what the end user actually perceives when consuming the service. This paradigm is called Quality of user Experience (QoE) and differs from the traditional Quality of Service (QoS) approach in the human perspective given to quality estimations. In order to measure the subjective opinion that a user has about a given service, different approaches can be taken. The most accurate methodology is performing subjective tests in which a panel of human testers rates the quality of the service under evaluation. This approach returns a quality score, so-called Mean Opinion Score (MOS), for the considered service in a scale 1 - 5. This methodology presents several drawbacks such as its high expenses and the impossibility of performing tests at real time. For those reasons, several mathematical models have been presented in order to provide an estimation of the QoE (MOS) reached by different multimedia services In this thesis, the focus is on evaluating and understanding the multimedia-content transmission-process in wireless networks from a QoE perspective. To this end, firstly, the QoE paradigm is explored aiming at understanding how to evaluate the quality of a given multimedia service. Then, the influence of the impairments introduced by the wireless transmission channel on the multimedia communications is analyzed. Besides, the functioning of different WLAN schemes in order to test their suitability to support highly demanding traffic such as the multimedia transmission is evaluated. Finally, as the main contribution of this thesis, new mechanisms or strategies to improve the quality of multimedia services distributed over IEEE 802.11 networks are presented. Concretely, the distribution of multimedia services over ad-hoc networks is deeply studied. Thus, a novel opportunistic routing protocol, so-called JOKER (auto-adJustable Opportunistic acK/timEr-based Routing) is presented. This proposal permits better support to multimedia services while reducing the energy consumption in comparison with the standard ad-hoc routing protocols.Universidad Politécnica de CartagenaPrograma Oficial de Doctorado en Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicacione

Portugal Telecom adapting to the market : MEO, the new future

In 2007 the Portuguese telecommunications market changed. With the spin-off of PT Multimédia from Portugal Telecom, a new company was born: Zon Multimédia. Portugal Telecom was the incumbent operator in telecommunications providing all the main telecommunications services. With the spin-off, PT ran out of the valuable Pay-TV service for the consumer. The Case Study presents the strategy of PT when in face of the spin-off, and its response with the creation of MEO, a new product mainly focused on TV services, with irreverent features that would change the normal way to watch TV. The Master Thesis also includes a Literature Review and a Teaching Note. The Literature Review provides a theoretical approach to the main subjects addressed in the Case and the Teaching Note is the analysis of the Case Study.Multimédia da Portugal Telecom, nasceu uma nova empresa: Zon Multimédia. Portugal Telecom era o operador incumbente nas telecomunicações fornecendo os principais serviços das telecomunicações. Com o spin-off, a PT ficou sem o seu serviço valioso para o consumidor a televisão por cabo. O Caso de Estudo apresenta a estratégia da PT para enfrentar o spin-off, e a sua resposta com a criação do MEO, um novo produto focado principalmente nos serviços televisivos, com características irreverentes que podem mudar a maneira de ver televisão. A Tese de Mestrado também inclui uma Revisão de Literatura e uma Nota de Ensino. A Revisão de Literatura oferece uma abordagem teórica para os principais temas retratados no Caso e a Nota de Ensino é a análise do Caso de Estudo

Leveraging cloud computing for IPTV : moving the set-top box to the cloud

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia de InformáticaP Television (IPTV) has changed the way we perceive our TV sets. It has given us the ability to take control of our TV viewing activities. We can now interact with our TV set in a way we might have thought impossible a few decades ago. With the push of a button we can schedule TV recordings, stop and even rewind the broadcast. Users are now able to control what they want to view, when they want to view it. TV sets have also evolved and gained a new set of functionalities, they have become smart, allowing us to connect o the Internet and decode media files that are inputed through usb ports and streamed through the network or the Internet. But the TV is no longer the center of our multimedia experience, now we have new ways to access the TV content we have subscribed. Viewing TV on a laptop, a smartphone or even a tablet is now more and more common. Cloud Computing (CC) has also brought us some revolutions, we can now have systems that grow and adapt on-the-fly to the conditions presented to them. An application can extend it’s storage capacity in a matter of minutes, and the same can be said of the processing power of the underlying platform. Our objective in this work is to discuss the possibility of creating a synergy between both services. By creating a system where IPTV and CC would interact, we could create a service that would provide IPTV anytime and anywhere. With the possibilities CC brings we can move the Set-top Box (STB) to the cloud and create new service functionalities and reduce the cost of having to install a STB in every client. We have focussed our work in the simulation of a CC infrastructure that would host Virtual STB’s that would be accessible from wherever there would be a network connection

Empirical studies of Quality of Experience (QoE) : A Systematic Literature Survey

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a relatively new phenomenon. The main focus of this thesis has been to conduct a systematic literature survey of research done in the field of QoE over a ten year period. The method, developed by A. Fink, has been used to survey empirical studies. A framework of QoE has been developed, which created the possibility of grouping together and analysing all the studies in a common framework. In total, 44 studies were analysed. 66 per cent of them were studies with human participants and 34 per cent of them were studies without human participants. The majority of the selected empirical studies have analysed the sub-aspect ‘satisfaction’. Among other vital sub-aspects, which were of interest to researches, were ‘usefulness’, ‘ease of use’, ‘communication’, ‘loss/packet loss’, ‘delay’, ‘bandwidth’, and ‘jitter’. The results of this survey show that different sub-aspects depend on different services. It is not enough that one sub-aspect functions very well, because most of sub-aspects are closely related to each other. Therefore, it is very important that sub-aspects, which are dependent on each other, are functioning as one group to achieve higher QoE on user experience. This thesis may contribute to deeper understanding of the phenomenon QoE. Knowledge of QoE can bring in new ideas and new possibilities for developing a new system or products for achieving satisfaction of user experience

Deliverable D8.2 First market analysis

This deliverable provides an overview of a first market analysis of the IPTV market. It points out possible customers, competitors and the differences between LinkedTV and their competitive firms

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Television was born analogue, almost 100 years ago: first broadcast across airwaves, then delivered via analogue cable and satellite, to reach millions and millions of people around the world. Like many other industries, television has been under the process of digital transformation, integrating digital technologies in all parts of its value chain, from content production to content distribution. Today, inseparable from the digital transformation process is the large, diverse and ever-growing volume of data created, captured, analyzed and applied – also known as Big Data. Television is being reshaped by Big Data, with newcomers to the industry such as Netflix leading the way, for others to follow - and for others to fail. The concepts of Platform Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism and Dataism may illuminate many of the challenges faced by the main stakeholders in the television industry, with implications that go much beyond this field. Lastly, Netflix’s impact on the production, distribution and consumption of audiovisual content is still to be understood in a small market such as Portugal: the current exploratory paper is also meant to be the basis of future research in Portugal about internet-distributed television

COST EFFICIENT PROVISIONING OF MASS MOBILE MULTIMEDIA SERVICES IN HYBRID CELLULAR AND BROADCASTING SYSTEMS

Uno de los retos a los que se enfrenta la industria de las comunicaciones móviles e inalámbricas es proporcionar servicios multimedia masivos a bajo coste, haciéndolos asequibles para los usuarios y rentables a los operadores. El servicio más representativo es el de TV móvil, el cual se espera que sea una aplicación clave en las futuras redes móviles. Actualmente las redes celulares no pueden soportar un consumo a gran escala de este tipo de servicios, y las nuevas redes de radiodifusión móvil son muy costosas de desplegar debido a la gran inversión en infraestructura de red necesaria para proporcionar niveles aceptables de cobertura. Esta tesis doctoral aborda el problema de la provisión eficiente de servicios multimedia masivos a dispositivos móviles y portables utilizando la infraestructura de radiodifusión y celular existente. La tesis contempla las tecnologías comerciales de última generación para la radiodifusión móvil (DVB-H) y para las redes celulares (redes 3G+ con HSDPA y MBMS), aunque se centra principalmente en DVB-H. El principal paradigma propuesto para proporcionar servicios multimedia masivos a bajo coste es evitar el despliegue de una red DVB-H con alta capacidad y cobertura desde el inicio. En su lugar se propone realizar un despliegue progresivo de la infraestructura DVB-H siguiendo la demanda de los usuarios. Bajo este contexto, la red celular es fundamental para evitar sobre-dimensionar la red DVB-H en capacidad y también en áreas con una baja densidad de usuarios hasta que el despliegue de un transmisor o un repetidor DVB-H sea necesario. Como principal solución tecnológica la tesis propone realizar una codificación multi-burst en DVB-H utilizando códigos Raptor. El objetivo es explotar la diversidad temporal del canal móvil para aumentar la robustez de la señal y, por tanto, el nivel de cobertura, a costa de incrementar la latencia de la red.Gómez Barquero, D. (2009). COST EFFICIENT PROVISIONING OF MASS MOBILE MULTIMEDIA SERVICES IN HYBRID CELLULAR AND BROADCASTING SYSTEMS [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/6881Palanci