NOSSDAV 2007

NOSSDAV 2007 has some rather interesting papers on IPTV, so it is worth to check the conference's website.

Internship in Telefonica R&D, Barcelona

I have been a little quiet for some time because I am now in Telefonica Research Labs in Barcelona, so I've been quite busy moving, finding a place, etc. I am here for a 3 or 6 month internship as part of my PhD. I am working on "user profiling for IPTV". I have lots (hundreds of GB!) of interesting data from Imagenio (Telefonica's IPTV service) - switching logs, EPG (Electronic Program Guide) information - to analyse.

This data is very useful for user profiling and recommendation systems (to be used for targeted advertisement, for instance), and I am sure will also be useful for my PhD research, as input to my simulations.

IPTV subscribers worldwide forecast to reach 38.4m by 2012

A new report that there will be a huge growth in the number of IPTV subscribers worldwide by 2012, increasing seven-fold from the end-2006 figure to reach 38.2 million. Revenues for service providers will possibly rise ten-fold.

These is only a prediction, and one can believe on it or not, but the fact is that service providers today seem to believe that IPTV will be the next killer application. A paper written last month, in IEEE Communications Magazine, was thus properly entitled "Internet Protocol Television (IPTV): The Killer Application for the Next-Generation Internet". Although this paper is not very well written and makes some confusing and sometimes even erroneous remarks (like confusing DSL filters cutoff frequency... twice!) - which is strange in one such a high level magazine - it is nevertheless worth reading.

KOREA: LG Dacom launches IPTV service

LG Dacom, Korea's third-largest fixed-line operator, yesterday launched the 3rd IPTV service in that country. While most contries worldwide are only now offering their first IPTV, South Korea has now 3 companies offering the service, which really illustrates their almost leading position in broadband services.

Central America's First IPTV Service

Panama’s CTV Telecom is the first operator offering IPTV service in Central America. It has selected the Amino AmiNET125 multi-codec Set-Top-Box (STB) for its service.

CTV will build a 100% fibre optical network in Panama City (the capital) exclusively to deliver the new IPTV service.

BCS Roger Needham Lecture

One of the nicest things of being a student in Cambridge is the incredible number of excelent talks, seminars, workshops, etc., available. It is very difficult to choose what events to go to each week.

Last week I went to London to attend a lecture by Professor Mark Handley. And what a great lecture it was! Professor Handley has done very significant research on computer networks for the past decade or more, and he is the author of several Internet standards such as SIP and PIM-SM (the de facto IP multicast protocol used by nowadays’ service providers). He is also the co-author of two books, both written together with one of my PhD supervisors, Professor Jon Crowcroft. Here are links for both books: The World Wide Web - Beneath the Surf and Internetworking Multimedia. Professor Handley was this year's winner of the Roger Needham award.

The topic – “Evolving the Internet: Challenges, Opportunities and Consequences” – was very interesting, and Mark touched very sensible points. As a very general summary, the main idea he passed was that the evolution of the Internet must be made with the use of flexible technology. He pointed some problems that should be addressed in the actual Internet: its openness (leading to atacks), congestion problems, and BGP (the de facto standard for interdomain routing). He also gave nice examples taken from his own experience: IP mcast (not totally successful; it is not global as they wanted, it is only used inside single ISPs) and SIP (very successful).

Imagenio grows and grows...

Telefonica's Imagenio IPTV service has 469,000 subscribers already (12% share of the Spanish pay-TV market). And they are now also on the Czech Republic with 53,000 customers.