Featured Article. Building a Content-Aware Network. Intelligently Matching Content Providers to Content Viewers

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2 Featured Article Building a Content-Aware Network Intelligently Matching Content Providers to Content Viewers By: Jonathan Bosloy, CTO, Solace Systems IPTV systems that use Content-Aware networks have the potential to intelligently and efficiently link hundreds of thousands of content sources to millions of viewers. This offers IPTV service providers a strong service differentiation tool as compared to traditional broadcast networks and it can dramatically increase service revenue while increasing the value of the user experience (UE). Content-Aware networks identify, qualify, suggest and match content to users based on their specific interest. At first blush, matching content with interest does not sound terribly difficult. There are content streams or channels and there are the viewers. Viewers simply need to know how to find channels, right? Not exactly. If we look to recent history, similar large, real-time networks such as financial data and supply chain networks have solved this problem using publish/subscribe technology. What is Publish/Subscribe? Publish/subscribe infrastructure is interest-driven management of information from source to recipient. Content can be published to the publish/subscribe network, and automatically filtered to subscribers with matching interest. Publishers have no knowledge of the subscribers. The publish/subscribe infrastructure secures, tracks and reports to the billing system about what was sent where. For example, a live airing of an art auction may be coming up on Auctions-TV. Since your profile knows that you are an art enthusiast, and have previously watched an art auction on Auctions-TV; your personal programming portal can watch for upcoming programming of this kind. A second participant may be alerted because a Marc Chagall Figure 1 40 October 2006

3 drawing is going to be auctioned, and she is interested in any programming about Chagall. Still a third might find out about the program because they had registered interest through their remote during a commercial for the art auction the day before. Another does not want to tune in, but would like to track the auction bids as a ticker across the bottom of their screen while they watch a soccer match on another channel. Relative to the total viewing audience, the group interested in the art auction is very small, but for the auction house and for those interested, this is a very valuable service. Each new bid must be routed to Auctions-TV, where it is validated against member credit records and re-published to all viewers. In this scenario, the service provider may publish the overall program schedule and the Auctions-TV channel publishes or pushes all auction updates into the network. The network between the publisher and subscribers automatically filters, secures, routes and even transforms (perhaps to support the on screen ticker) the information to only the people that are interested in that content. Multiply this simple example by thousands of channels and millions of users and you have the size and complexity of the problem service providers must address. It may be true that traditional programming from broadcast and cable networks will capture 80 per cent of viewers in the next several years, but this is not where IPTV will differentiate from cable or satellite. Just like with the web, the infrastructure must be prepared to support a very large number of programs, each of which can generate a large number of programming events. Network-Centric Publish/Subscribe Many of today's software-based publish/subscribe systems were built with an exclusively enterprise focus. IPTV needs to be much more dynamic and much higher scale. First, it needs to be completely decoupled between sender and receiver. The system must automatically manage all interest subscriptions, match content and subscriber interests, bill for activity and deliver highly efficient information flow. Second, there must be minimal to no infrastructure in the set top box. All of the publish/subscribe intelligence must be network resident and distributed throughout the network. Such a network-centric approach improves substantially on traditional publish/subscribe. By contrast, an approach that relies on central backhauling of content for distribution back to users will have substantially higher latency, bandwidth utilization and scaling issues over time. Better for the Consumer and Service Provider Embedding understanding of program content directly within the network offers a much more personalized experience for the consumer, as their TV patterns and personal interests can fully converge in the IPTV medium. Figure 2 42 October 2006

4 Figure 3 For the service provider, there are many important benefits: o Efficient use of network resources - Between the content source and end consumers, content is sent once through the infrastructure and then individually through the last mile. Content can be pushed into the network with confidence that highly optimized routing, filtering and delivery will get the information where it needs to go. o Simplified administration - Personalization directly within the network eliminates the need to centralize profiles and program content in caches at various points around the network. o New revenue opportunities - Improving IPTV personalization represents an opportunity for many incremental charges based on user choices. In a publish/subscribe architecture, billing is an easy add-on to each IPTV event, resulting in rapid creation of micro-services within the larger IPTV service. o Flexibility to change and grow - General purpose publish/subscribe can support basic IPTV functionality today and virtually any scenario that can be developed in the future. The next section will cover examples of IPTV metadata that can leverage a networkcentric publish subscribe systems immediately. Subscribe FREE at October

5 Examples of IPTV Metadata Publish/subscribe as an approach is useful for nearly any form of data distribution associated with IPTV. Below is a table highlighting some examples: Program Data Alerts and Updates Programming information published to the infrastructure will efficiently be matched with the right users at the right time. Each user can have a personal directory featuring programming that is likely to be of interest to them. Digital Rights Management (DRM) UpdatesSecuring content on IPTV is not a trivial challenge. Each channel has a unique secure key that changes many times a day through negotiation between the user's billing profile, the set top box, and the service provider or content owner. DRM updates alone can represent hundreds of millions of updates a day. Publish/subscribe infrastructure can securely multicast these updates directly from the authority to the right set top boxes assuring continuous channel operation. Delivering Carrier-Grade Network- Centric IPTV Infrastructure At Solace Systems we have built a Value-Added Services Routing System that implements a carrier-scale publish/subscribe infrastructure entirely in hardware. Many large service providers are working with Solace today to extend their networks with a content-aware routing overlay. Each individual Solace Value-Added Services Router uses special purpose hardware to secure, filter, route and transform all forms of data and metadata documents based upon their contents. While each single router supports high-levels of throughput, the overall routing system scales by adding more routers to distribute the load. The network of Solace routers all work together to automatically react to the changing interests of subscribers and move data efficiently through the network to where it is needed. 44 October 2006