1st Greek Architecture User Group Meeting - Internet TV design lab
Following the example of the Portuguese Architecture Councils and the advice of several Architecture MVPs, some foolhardy folks decided to start a Greek Architecture User Group. Membership and attendance to the meetings will be open to anyone interested, although we may try to keep the design lab meetings small. The first meeting will be a design lab on Internet TV applications. The second meeting will probably cover Executable Models and Model Driven Development. It seems that there are some of us working on Internet TV right now, while others have developed executable model platforms as far back as 1995.
Quoting from Wikipedia, "Internet television (or Internet TV) is television distributed via the Internet. Internet television allows viewers to choose the show they want to watch from a library of shows. The primary models for Internet television are streaming Internet TV or selectable video on an Internet location, typically a website. It differs from IPTV in that IPTV offerings are typically offered on discrete service provider networks."
That definition can cover a lot of different applications. In our first meeting we will limit the discussion to two specific applications:
- A Joost-like TV broadcasting application
- A subscription service for educational videos and webcasts.
We will discuss the similarities and differences of the two systems in various layers of the system, from the video player to the media library management to system and broadcast quality monitoring.
An Internet TV architecture has to consider several factors:
- Who are the users of the system? Are they the viewers, the media library administrators, the people doing the transcoding to the application's video format, advertisers that may want to create interactive advertisements, the program administrators that want to choose which videos are available to different customers at different periods, others that we will discover during our discussion?
- Will the system support channels and how will they work? How is the program catalog created and how is it used? Should the catalog be personalized?
- Will there be different subscription models? There could be a free package that includes a lot of advertisements, a paid Plus package with fewer advertisement and a Gold package with premium movies and series but no advertisements at all.
- How is the media library managed? What are the metadata needed for each media entry that will facilitate the creation of catalogs and channels? What should a media entry include: the actual videos, trailers, photos and thumbnails, summaries, reviews? Media shoul also be marked according to genre, whether it is a new release, the actors,etc.
- How flexible should the video player be? Should it be a separate application, like Joost or should it be embedded in a web site like Youtube? Maybe we want to present overlayed information like player statistics during a basketball game? Informational links during an educational video? Chat?
- What is the necessary infrastructure? Can we use a P2P network? Do we use a service like ΑΚΑΜΑΙ? Do we only put the video on AKAMAI's network or do we upload the advertisements and the overlays as well?
- Monitoring and operations is extremely important for a TV stations and is also important for an Internet TV station. How do we guarantee the smooth operation of the application? How do the operators detect that something may be wrong? How do they monitor and measure operations in order to plan future upgrades?
- More technical matters: Silverlight 1.0, 2.0 or Flex? Do we need DRM? AKAMAI or LiveStation? Could we use both?
This is only a quick overview of the factors that should be considered when creating the architecture of an Internet TV application. We expect to go in greater depth during the Architecture User Group meeting.