Alcatel-Lucent adds targeted advertising to IPTV

“In many cases, users will ‘re-skin’ their middleware and log on to their own [program guide] because they want a certain look and feel or recommendations,” Weldon said. “We can rely on that along with channel-change information. Now it’s an IP address. In the future it could be personal if the user opts in. That’s subject to working through the privacy issues.”

Separately today, Alcatel-Lucent announced improvements to the routing blade it introduced in June that identifies service flows and protects the service quality of time-sensitive applications such as video. The newest version, available on the company’s routers as of next year’s first quarter and on its access nodes in the middle of next year, allows for faster channel changing and retransmission of lost packets.

“We pre-send the Internet frame you need to watch the channel and catch the user up with the unicast stream to catch up with the live stream,” Weldon said, reducing the few seconds of delay IPTV users sometimes suffer when changing channels.

Over time, the system’s 30-second memory buffer could potentially be expanded to 30 minutes, enabling the pausing of live TV – a feature Weldon said could be included in Alcatel-Lucent’s gear roughly a year from now. Around that time, the company might also begin offering larger content caches in what Weldon called “a larger evolution to a full [content delivery network] architecture” that he sees taking off in the next decade.