Abstract

TV and video services landscape is currently undergoing significant changes. Traditional TV broadcasting model is supplemented and often even replaced by digital content distribution services over the Internet. As a result of this trend, a range of services and contents available for users is rapidly expanding. As a side-effect, designing efficient user interfaces for discovering the content, as well as for manipulating associated interactive services, becomes more and more cumbersome. Pervasive computing and context-awareness principles seem to be promising for making user interaction with the system more seamless and fluid. This paper discusses context-awareness as a new trend for services personalization, defining the meaning of ”context” and different contextual data relevant for IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services. A novel architecture for unified storage and processing situational data in IPTV service domain is presented, together with discussion of its implementation issues and validation by testbed experiments. The UP-TO-US context-aware architecture is designed for seamless monitoring of user’s environment (including networks and terminals), interpreting user’s requirements and making the user’s interaction with the TV system dynamic and transparent. Consequently, content personalization is achieved, matching the user’s needs and current state of his surrounding environment.