From IPTV Services to Shared Experiences: Challenges in Architecture Design

This paper discusses the architectural challenges of transitioning from services to experiences. In particular, it focuses on evolution from traditional IPTV services to more social scenarios, in which groups of people in different locations watch synchronized multimedia content together. In addition to the multimedia content, the shared experiences envisioned in this article provide a real-time communication channel between the participants. Based on an implemented architecture, this paper identifies a number of challenges and analyze them. The most important challenges highlighted in this article include: shared experience modeling, universal session handling, synchronization, and quality of service. This article is the first stone paving the way for a truly interoperable ecosystem, which can offer cross-domain experiences to the users.