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User interactivity and customisation are key features that must be promoted to help distinguish IPTV from satellite/aerial/cable TV alternatives. Furthermore, IPTV providers also have to compete with Internet TV by providing extra features to justify the cost. In this paper, we present a number of scenarios whereby IPTV providers can achieve this through the use of synchronised time. Integrating and tightly synchronising multiple user-selected media streams in Real-Time that are logically and temporally related potentially adds significant extra value to any IPTV platform. It also raises significant research challenges. We outline the prototype developed for a TV/Text Feed scenario and present some details of ongoing and future work.

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Abstract-Watching a sport event via an IPTV channel and choosing a broadcast radio station as a play-out audio stream is the scenario discussed in this paper. Hybrid Broadcast and Broadband TV (hbbTV) provides an excellent platform to combine multimedia delivered via both systems. By following the recommendations in this paper, a synchronized play-out of multiple media streams delivered via the hbbTV system can be achieved. I. INTRODUCTIONThe future is moving towards the unification of TV delivery systems within one single TV receiver as described by Hybrid Broadcast and Broadband TV (hbbTV) [1]. Each TV delivery system, broadcast and broadband, due to its own characteristics, provides different features which, unified at the client-side, can develop into new services. Broadcast TV technologies include satellite, terrestrial and cable, whereas broadband access is used by IPTV and webTV.The services provided by hbbTV can be improved via the combined play-out of an IPTV video delivery with a broadcast radio channel, which is of particular interest to sports viewers. In other words, a viewer selects a sports event on an IPTV channel and then decides on the commentary, depending on the language and style of that commentary.A key point is to provide a synchronised play-out of video and audio streams. This allows IPTV companies to offer this possibility to their subscribed clients [2] and allows those broadcast companies to be differentiated from other free TV delivery systems. Fig. 1 illustrates this possibility based on the Network Time Protocol (NTP) [3], which in this paper is establish a way to distribute time in DVB to enable synch between media delivered via DVB and IP Networks.Depending on which form of delivery is used, other protocols are also required. Using MP2T [4], as the core packetization system, facilitates synchronisation between media streams delivered via both technologies. Broadcast systems are transmitted via Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standards. Special relevance is given to the DVB standard for audio/video coding used in broadcasting applications based on MP2T [5]. TV channels transmitted via IPTV also use the MP2T packetization and, although not obligatory for the transport of the media delivery, the use of the Real-Time Protocol (RTP) [6] is recommended to add extra reliability.The paper now considers multimedia synchronisation before passing on to the proposed solution.

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