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This paper presents several aspects, from technologies to business models, of content recommendation for video related solutions that range from IP television (IPTV), including linear programming television (LPTV) and videoon-demand (VoD), to online video. Video content recommendation is becoming increasingly important because of the continuously increasing amount of video content available to end users. After considering some end user requirements, an analysis is provided of the most important content recommendation technologies as described in literature and implemented by many start-ups. The paper also deals with evaluation criteria for a content recommender system related to user expectations, support of different scenarios (e.g., new content, new users), and marketing and business requirements. We describe the overall architecture into which the content recommendation functionality fits, as well as its interfaces with other network components, external databases, social networks, and applications.Finally, we discuss a dedicated network provider play, the business opportunities, and several business models for content recommendation. © 2011 Alcatel-Lucent. very exciting, the overwhelming choice in content available on broadcast TV, VoD, and the Internet is also leading to much irritation and frustration of the end user, since it is becoming increasingly hard to pick out that one movie, program, or video clip best suited to his mood, environment, and interest at that moment. It demands quite some patience, perseverance, and time from the end user to sift the programming guide, click through all channels, or browse the complete VoD catalog in order to find something of interest to watch. Because of this, people tend to stick IntroductionThe expansion of the Internet and the advent of digital broadcasting have led to an ever-increasing range of content at the fingertips of the end user. Video-on-demand (VoD) libraries are approaching 20,000 titles per aggregator with substantial further growth expected; the number of online aggregators is increasing continuously; millions of Internet video clips are accessible on television (TV); and the number of linear programming television (LPTV) channels is increasing constantly, along with content on catchup TV (recordings of LPTV). Although this sounds to what they are used to watching, and the promise of having everything you like at your fingertips is still only a promise.This dilemma not only short-circuits the end user experience, but sets the stage for dissatisfaction and the risk that an end user will turn his back on the service as well as the content provider. An NDS Group survey of more than 1,000 cable customers in the United States (U.S.) found that LPTV program recommendations are one of the top applications they desire. Keeping in mind that millions of people in the U.S. are spending 150 hours per month in front of their TV sets [19], improving the end user experience with content discovery can lead to a win-win-win situation for the end user, service prov...

telecommunication companies to offer data services including web browsing or email to their customers, are now being upgraded to also offer video services (referred to as Internet Protocol TV [IPTV] over DSL) to these customers. Because of their easy access to a return channel and because individual customers are easily addressed, these DSL networks have an advantage over traditional networks to offer the new emerging video services. However, since they were designed to support data services, they may need special measures to offer the linear programming TV service at the same quality of (evolutions of) traditional networks.

The current heterogeneity in networks and devices demands for a high degree of flexibility in IPTV systems for digital television. A scalable video coding scheme (in this paper we focus on H.264/AVC's scalable video coding extension SVC) accommodates this flexibility from the coding point of view. Because the IP-based network delivery chain in IPTV systems may suffer from packet loss (having a severe impact on the visual quality) it is necessary to provide means for error concealment. In this paper we propose a novel method that performs adaptation on impaired SVC bitstreams so that the resulting adapted bitstream is compliant to the SVC specification and that the reconstruction result at the decoder is equivalent compared to the approach where the error concealment is implemented in the decoder itself. The adapted bitstreams have a significantly higher visual quality while our approach does not require any modification to existing SVC-compliant decoders. The results of several experiments show that the proposed method is extremely fast (over 900 frames/s) and that it introduces a negligible overhead in terms of bit rate (ca. 0.02%)

C e n t r u m v o o r W i s k u n d e e n I n f o r m a t i c a PNA Probability, Networks and Algorithms Probability, Networks and Algorithms Modeling Ping times in First Person (RTT), i.e., the sum of the network delay from client to server and the network delay from server to client, impacts the gamer's performance considerably. Game client software usually has a built-in process to measure this RTT (also referred to as Ping time), and as such gamers do not want to connect to servers with a large Ping time. This paper develops a methodology to evaluate the Ping time in a scenario where gamers access a common gaming server over an access network, consisting of a link per user that connects this user to a shared aggregation node that in turn is connected to the gaming server via a bottleneck link. First, a model for the traffic the users and the server generate, is proposed based on experimental results of previous papers. It turns out that the characteristics of the (downstream) traffic from server to clients differ substantially from the characteristics of the client-to-server (upstream) traffic. Then, two queuing models are developed (one for the upstream and one for the downstream direction) and combined such that a quantile of the RTT can be calculated given all traffic and network parameters (packet sizes, packet inter-arrival times, link rate, network load, ...). This methodology is subsequently used to assess the (quantile of the) RTT in a typical Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access scenario. In particular, given the capacity dedicated to gaming traffic on the bottleneck link (between the aggregation node and gaming server), the number of gamers (or equivalently the gaming load the bottleneck link can support) is determined under the restriction that the quantile of the RTT should not exceed a predefined bound. It turns out that this tolerable load is surprisingly low in most circumstances. Finally, it is remarked that this conclusion depends to some extent on the details of the downstream traffic characteristics and that measurements reported in literature do not give conclusive evidence on the exact value of all parameters, such that, although the qualitative conclusions still remain valid, additional experiments could refine the detailed quantitative results. AbstractIn First Person Shooter (FPS) games the Round Trip Time (RTT), i.e., the sum of the network delay from client to server and the network delay from server to client, impacts the gamer's performance considerably. Game client software usually has a built-in process to measure this RTT (also referred to as Ping time), and as such gamers do not want to connect to servers with a large Ping time. This paper develops a methodology to evaluate the Ping time in a scenario where gamers access a common gaming server over an access network, consisting of a link per user that connects this user to a shared aggregation node that in turn is connected to the gaming server via a bottleneck link. First, a model for the traffic the users and the server gen...

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