The UCT IMS IPTV Initiative

As revenues from voice services continue to fall, telecommunication operators have begun to develop and acquire new services in an attempt to generate new revenue streams and to avoid losing customers to third party service providers. One such service that many, if not all, operators are investigating is Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). IPTV provides broadcast television channels as well as Video on Demand (VoD) content to subscribers, delivering the video content using the Internet Protocol (IP). The UCT Advanced IPTV v2.0 system is an open source implementation of an IPTV system based on ETSI TISPAN standards. The proposed system also incorporates multimedia content adaptation methods in order to adapt video to meet varying client terminal devices and access network characteristics. This paper describes the history of the project followed by the relevant ETSI TISPAN standards. It then goes on to discuss the software architecture of the developed system and provides results of several transcoding tests.