Planning and managing the IPTV service deployment

The deployment of converged services of TV, telephony, and Internet access over IP entails a significant initial investment for service providers. This investment is not only for the underlying network infrastructure but also for provisioning and managing vast data centers needed to provide sophisticated IP-based TV (IPTV) experience, including multiple camera views, live (broadcast) and on demand programming, etc., to a large number of viewers. Thus the service providers need to carefully plan and manage the IPTV service deployment to maximize the return-on-investment while providing a good quality of experience to the subscribers. In this paper, we develop a methodology to aid service providers to effectively plan for the staggered deployment of IPTV services in this fledgling market. We present the utility of this framework by demonstrating a planning tool developed from this framework. © 2007 IEEE.