Adding the Community to Channel Surfing: A New Approach to IPTV Channel Change

While IPTV architecture and user interfaces have received a lot of interest in recent years much less focus has been given to the issues of channel surfing in the IPTV era. IPTV is rapidly transitioning from a Telco solution into a generic service over any broadband access network. Traffic issues that relate to channel change are moving to the mainstream and are the talk of a number of standards organizations. This paper proposes a new approach to channel change. It uses peering and viewing statistics to reduce channel change delays and improve the user quality of experience.