Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Mobile Web applications

This document presents the work that was elaborated at the company Present Technologies as part of the academic discipline Internship/Industrial Project for the Master’s degree in Informatics and Systems, Software Development branch, at Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra. The area of the mobile web applications has grown exponentially over the last few years turning it into a very dynamic field where new development platforms and frameworks are constantly emerging. Thus, the internship consisted in the study of two new mobile operating systems, Tizen and Firefox OS, as well as two frameworks for packaging of mobile web applications – Adobe PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium. These platforms are in the direct interest of Present Technology since it pretends to use them in its future projects in general and in the Phune Gaming project in particular. Since Television is one of the Present Technologies’ business areas, during the course of the internship it was decided to perform additionally a study of two Smart TV platforms, namely Samsung Smart TV and Opera TV, which was considered as a valuable knowledge for the company. For each of the platforms was performed a study about its architecture, supported standards and the development tools that are provided, nevertheless the focus was on the applications and for this reason a practical case study was conducted. The case studies consisted in the creation of a prototype or packaging of an application, for the case of the packaging tools, in order to prove the feasibility of the applications for the Present Technologies’ needs. The outcome of the work performed during the internship is that it raised the awareness of Present Technology of the studied platforms, providing it with prototypes and written documentation for the platforms’ successful usage in future projects

IPTV open source

The continuous developments made on the network infrastructures allow to provide quality in multimedia services over-the-top. Also, mobile data traffic has been increasingly growing along with smartphone’s capabilities. This growth motivates the creation of multi-platform solutions that can target not only these devices but, in the case of the IPTV world, also the set-top-boxes, smart televisions and computers. HTTP streaming is a technique directed to stream over-the-top multimedia. Many global platforms make use of HTTP streaming, with names like Youtube or Netflix. In this work, a server architecture for streaming the public Portuguese channels as well as a multiplatform client architecture are proposed. The proposed software can be deployed on any regular server and provide extra functionalities such as tv listings. The client can run on any Media Source Extension (MSE) browser, without the need of any plugin like Flash. Finally, some tests were made on the two entities (server and client) in order to test the performance of the server and behaviour of the client through different network conditions.Os constantes desenvolvimentos a nível de infraestrutura de rede permitem fornecer serviços multimedia de qualidade sobre redes IP. Além disso, tráfego de dados em redes móveis tem crescido com o aumento de capacidades dos dispositivos móveis inteligentes, crescimento esse que motivou a criação de soluçõesmulti-plataformaquepodemdirecionarnãosóessesmesmosdispositivos, mas, no caso do mundo IPTV, também as set-top-boxes, televisores inteligentes e computadores. HTTP streaming é uma técnica direcionada a transmissão de dados multimedia sobre redes IP. Várias plataformas a nível global fazem uso de streaming HTTP, sendo Youtube ou Netflix dos exemplos mais conhecidos. Neste trabalho, é proposta uma arquitetura para um servidor de streaming dos canais públicos Portugueses, bem como, uma arquitetura de cliente multiplataforma. O software proposto pode ser implementado emqualquerservidorregularefornecerfuncionalidadesextra,comogrelhade programação. O cliente é suportado por qualquer navegador Media Source Extension (MSE) sem a necessidade de programas ou extensões adicionais, como o Flash. Finalmente, foram feitos alguns testes nas duas entidades (servidor e cliente) para testar o desempenho do servidor e o comportamento do cliente através de diferentes condições a nível de rede.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic