Abstract
Thanks to the technological development, the production of multimedia content is no longer restricted to content providers. End-users communities are enabled to efficiently share, distribute, manage, and consume audio-visual contents. In this context, community networks are expected to play a central role. This kind of networks can be understood as the sum of all networks that interconnect devices in the homes, and the homes in a neighbourhood. They can use diversity of technologies, and among all of them, PLC (power line communication) is a very good alternative. In order to provide community networks with proper video services an appropriate middleware support is required to glue together the services and the infrastructures. In this respect, P2P (peer-to-peer) technology is a very good candidate to achieve this objective. On the other hand, there are several aspects of the PLC medium that make it difficult to share resources fairly but they can be solved using P2P technology. In this work, different proposal to provide VoD services using P2P technology are reviewed.
TopIn-Home/In-Building Networking
Home networking is defined by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) Board of Directors as follows (Consumer Electronics Association, 2008): “A home network interconnects electronic products and systems, enabling control of them, and remote access to any available content such as music, video or data”. The key points in this definition are connection, access, and control (Rose, 2001).
Key Terms in this Chapter
IPTV (Internet Protocol Television): Television content that, instead of being delivered through traditional broadcast and cable formats, is received by the viewer through the technologies used for computer networks.
Streaming Video: It is content send in compressed form over the Internet and displayed by the viewer in real time. With streaming video a Web used does not have to wait to download a file to play it.
Home Network: Home network is a residential local area network, and it is used to connect multiple devices within the home.
Community Network: Community networks are the sum of all networks that interconnect devices in the homes and the homes in a neighborhood.
P2PTV: It refers to P2P applications designed to distribute video streams in real time on a P2P network.
Power Line Communications: It is the use of existing electrical cables to transport data, and it has been around for a very long time. Power utilities have been using this technology for many years to send or receive data on the power grid using the existing infrastructure.
Video-on-Demand: Video on Demand systems allow users to select and watch video content on demand. VOD systems either stream content through a set-top box, allowing viewing in real time, or download it to a device such as a computer, digital video recorder, personal video recorder or portable media player for viewing at any time.