In conventional TV production, primary distribution – or the commercial aspect of content creation – is usually managed by production companies while the content preparation, generally managed by TV channels, consists of aggregating all the contents, then building a programme, inserting advertising, news, talk shows and so on. The network ingestion is seen here as an agnostic process. Finally, the content distribution – the consumer side of the value chain – tends to be managed by operators that ultimately ‘present’ the picture on displays, whether mobiles, TV screens or tablets. In this approach, the value chain is linear and contiguous, physically defined and located in time and/or space. But with current TV services evolving rapidly and TV and Internet converging, the way we all watch TV is set to be transformed.
The ITEA 2 ICARE project proposes an alternative solution for TV entertainment using network cloud architecture to allow distributed, scalable and adaptive solutions: content can come from anywhere in the cloud and go everywhere, whatever the format of audio or video, together with multi-screen data and entertainment services. In other words, ingesting content from all kinds of sources, whether broadcast or broadband, and delivering the resulting combination of streams and data to all types of access networks.