Supporting Interactive IPTV Apps with an Enterprise Resource Bus

Abstract

Delivering TV services via internet protocols over high-speed connections is commonly referred to as IPTV (Internet Protocol TeleVision). A particularly interesting aspect of IPTV is the augmentation of the subscriber’s TV experience with interactive applications (apps). Due to the service-oriented infrastructure of many IPTV platforms it is fairly easy to integrate 3rd party services and expose them in form of IPTV apps. However, due to the very competitive market in which IPTV providers operate, they are forced to minimize their costs and thus avoid costly customer complaints. This in turn introduces the need for highly dependable IPTV apps/web services with minimal downtimes. This paper focuses on the development of dependable web services for IPTV. Using Brewer’s CAP theorem the paper investigates the role of state-management within web services and presents the idea of the Enterprise Resource Bus (ERB) and an evaluation of its Erlang implementation.