IMS and IPTV Service Blending - Lessons and Opportunities

The authors have created several services that blend telephony and digital TV service components. The paper presents the major challenges faced by the authors as they built these services. It also presents the key lessons taught by these experiences, and it highlights opportunities for building further combined telephony-TV services with even greater effiency and economy. The paper begins by introducing the architecture of blended telephony and digital TV services. It then describes a blended service that the authors developed. The paper continues by describing the major challenges posed by this service's implementation and the lessons learned by solving these problems. The paper ends by noting some opportunities for new blended services and for improving their development and deployment environments.