Today's consumers have a wide variety of interactive media and services at their disposal, for instance, through IPTV networks, the Internet, and in-home and mobile networks. A major problem, however, is that media and services do not interoperate across networks because they use different user identities, metadata formats, and signaling protocols, for example. As a result, users cannot easily combine media and services from different network infrastructures and share them in an integrated manner with their family and friends. In addition to limiting people's media experience, this also hinders the introduction of new services and business models as providers cannot easily develop and operate cross-network services. The goal of our work is to overcome this problem by means of an open and intelligent service platform that allows applications to easily combine media and services from different network infrastructures, and enables consumers to easily share them in an integrated way. The platform includes support for managing multi-user sessions across networks, context-aware recommendations, and cross-network identity management. While there has been prior work on platforms for converged media, our platform is unique in that it provides open, intelligent, and interoperable facilities for sharing media and services across network infrastructures. In addition, our work involves several specific innovations, for instance, pertaining to cross-network session management and synchronization. In this article we discuss the platform, its most important enabling services, and some of the applications we have built on top of it. We also briefly consider the new kinds of business models our platform makes possible

With the steadily increasing amount of digital multimedia content, the user will be more and more overstrained. This applies to content being permanently available like videos of online video services as well as broadcast content like in the TV or radio domain. A promising solution for this problem is personalization. In the context of this paper, we refer to the selection and recommendation of content with respect to user's interests and preferences as personalization. These recommendations can either be presented to the user herself or be further used by services like a personalized electronic program guide (EPG) in the TV domain or for automated and personalized selection of content of online video services. This paper introduces an approach to personalize digital multimedia content based on user profile information. For this, two main mechanisms were developed: a profile generator that automatically creates user profiles representing the user preferences, and a content-based recommendation algorithm that estimates the user's interest in unknown content by matching her profile to metadata descriptions of the content. Both features are integrated into a personalization system.

One of the challenges in the world of interactive digital TV is to improve the user experience facilitated by these services. In this chapter, the authors discuss their approach towards reaching this goal, which is to integrate community and interactivity services (“Web 2.0”-style) of third-party providers from out side the world of IPTV into an IPTV service offering (e.g., services on the public Internet, and services offered by telco operators and end-users). The foundation of this work is an open service infrastructure that facilitates this form of integration. The authors discuss the set of service enablers that make up the infrastructure and present a working prototype implementation that serves as a proof of concept of their approach. They also outline four possible scenarios for the future of IPTV, which are based on a trend analysis and form the basis for developing business models made possible by their infrastructure.