NGN based IPTV & telecommunication services for the Vista Media Center

Home Theatre PCs (HTPCs) running the consumer version of Microsoft Windows Vista, including the so called Vista Media Center (VMC), are more and more entering the living rooms as a companion for the popular LCD and Plasma displays. Perfect ease of use and the visual integration on the screen and also into the living room is rising their acceptance continuously. Media Center PCs are a central node for TV, radio and other information, e.g. emails. They integrate by default photo, music and video libraries. With so called extender solutions it is possible to distribute content in the networked household, e.g. with a game console to the children's room. This paper goes a step beyond and presents the authors work on the integration of a Next Generation Network (NGN) based IPTV and telecommunication solution into a converged multimedia home entertainment platform. In detail our work on standardized infrastructures for IPTV and corresponding User Agents (UA) has been extended by creating a PC based client which can be integrated as an IMS based UA in ETSI TISPAN Release 2 IPTV infrastructures.