IPTV Content Management

Content Management is an important part of an IPTV solution. Content management refers to programming as well as advertising. As we had seen before, advertising will be more audience specific and due to this, it will become even more complicated for the provider to manage the advertising. Content management can be broken down into three sections: Encoding, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and billing.

Encoding
Encoding is necessary as the content has to be compressed before it is sent over the IP network. This will help service providers save on bandwidth. There are many advanced technologies used such as H.264 (a variety of MPEG-4) or Windows Media VC1.
Service providers receive content in many ways which include terrestrial broadcasts or via satellite. The master head-end is where the content is encoded before it is delivered. The master head-end then passes the encoded content to the regional hub. The regional hub also receives and encodes local content. This is a cost-effective way of managing the encoding process as it greatly reduces the need for high-capacity encoding at the regional level, thus minimizing the expense of purchasing costly encoding equipment.

DRM (Digital Rights Management)
Service providers have to address the issues that content developers have about security and delivery. The traditional TV is protected during transmission and due to the emerging concept of the digital home, service providers have to design a new rights management system that can secure the signal from transmission and its usage during the content's lifespan. This being said, Service providers cannot use the legacy rights management system but create a new rights management system.

Billing
Due to the complicated structure of content delivery and advertising, service providers will have to create new billing structures to address this concern. Users get content on demand and the service provider will have to create new billing systems that can track each and every customer's history and then bill them. Today's cable companies have a record of what channels the customers have ordered and charge them for those channels, the IPTV service providers will have to track every program or show that the customers view.