An On-Demand TV Service Architecture for Networked Home Appliances

Abstract

The recent advent of networked home appliances has enabled enhanced on-demand multimedia services to be feasible. Especially, personal video recorders have made it more convenient to manage broadcast TV programs at home by storing them on their own disks. However, standalone PVRs have limitations on availability of TV programs due to limited reception channel and storage capacity. Networked PVR services can get over these limitations by storing all broadcast TV programs in remote storage systems that servers provide. Thus, these networked PVR services can have several advantages over standalone PVRs in terms of cost and availability. In this article we therefore propose an on-demand TV service architecture for networked PVRs to reduce response times to interactive operations and save network bandwidth. Finally, we show from simulation results that our proposed architecture both decreases the number of programs whose initial time-shifting operations are delayed and increases the hit ratio in cache servers significantly.