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IPTV Technology Featured Article
June 30, 2008
OKI Announces Audience Rating Information System for IPTV
By Anuradha Shukla, TMCnet Contributing Editor
OKI has reportedly developed an “Audience (News - Alert) Rating Information System” for IPTV
. Targeted at the Japanese market, the new system collects viewership data to enable broadcasting companies to improve their services.
. Targeted at the Japanese market, the new system collects viewership data to enable broadcasting companies to improve their services.
OKI’s (News - Alert) Audience Rating Information System uses their eVideo technology to efficiently deliver high quality video over IP networks, according to Masa Saito, general manager of IP Systems Division at OKI.
networks, according to Masa Saito, general manager of IP Systems Division at OKI. He explained in a statement that they have been proposing the technology to handle audience rating information to ASTAP, Asia’s communication standard organization and FG-IPTV (News - Alert) in ITU, the UN’s agency for information and communication technologies, as they believe open standards are important in improving IPTV service and technologies.
Saito said that OKI will continue their activities within IPTV-GSI, the IPTV standardization initiative, to promote international standardization to enrich IPTV services.
According to OKI’s company sources, telecom carriers in Japan will increase their IPTV service provisioning with the start of next-generation network (NGN) services, and the ITU working on setting international standards.
) services, and the ITU working on setting international standards. All these will lead to a growth in the IPTV service in the nation. Although the existing ground-based broadcasting systems can collect viewership data such as user preference and viewer history, there are no equivalent user information collection functions, with current IPTV services.
OKI’s IPTV Audience Rating Information System will enable service providers, with the authorization of users, to obtain information about when and which channel and programs the users watched. The company’s officials explain that the new system will collect the viewership data in the form of an "audience rating library" on the user's device. This data will then be encrypted, sent to and registered in the database server at the IPTV distribution center. Finally, this information will be printed out as viewership reports which service providers can offer to program producers.
By utilizing the scalability offered by the server, service providers can increase the number of servers as viewership increases. The audience rating library can also be embedded in the set-top-boxes (STB) or in the IPTV. Those users having STBs or IPTVs without the embedded library can connect a home gateway (HGW) that has the audience rating library to collect viewership data. Audience Rating Information System has already been tested in IPTV applications that utilize mutli-casting.
Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anuradha’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
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