Project NOTTS

Abstract

Over-the-top (OTT) high-quality multimedia services, for example TV and music, are increasing in popularity. The whole telecommunication industry is undergoing a radical change as a result of the transition to digital content distribution. One trend is that large international players dominate the content distribution. Recently, actors like HBO and Netflix are entering the OTT market of several European countries, in a time when there have been significant sales of media terminals to consume this content (Smart TVs, tablets, smartphones, etc.). This means that both the terminals and the services for delivery of media over the Internet are available to end users.

The evolution of content-based applications as well as changed user consumption patterns will have a major impact on the networks. However, the current Internet architectures and business models have not been designed to cope with this massive deployment of over-the-top services. It is of strategical importance that European actors join forces in order to survive and thrive in the competition that gets more and more fierce. Otherwise, there is a risk that Europe falls behind in the media distribution area, which has a huge potential and increasing annual turnover. Therefore, NOTTS will investigate the technical problems experienced by service providers of over-the-top multimedia services, propose realistic solutions, and evaluate these solutions in testbeds and real networks. In order to address OTT technology and the potential new business opportunities more thoroughly, the project will also look for models where traditional network operators get their share of the raising OTT business.

The project covers the whole ecosystem of media distribution, from scalable coding, media distribution architectures and workload models, to client monitoring and business model analysis. Also, the project includes a wide range of industry and academic partners from five countries, which will guarantee that the project results are disseminated in the scientific communities as well as exploited in future products, standards, and business models. The final goal of the project is to provide technological solutions that involve a new business line for all stakeholders, so that as a result of this project the NOTTS prototype will be provided.