Beschreibung: In Dynamic Broadcast it is assumed that user terminals provide an interface to both a broadcast network and a broadband network. In addition, they are expected to be equipped with a storage device. The user terminals are capable of composing linear TV services of individual content items, which are either being received live via the broadcast or the broadband network or which are played back from a local storage device if they have been received before. Multiple content delivery mechanisms are supported, including live- and pre-transmission of TV programs. Inside the user terminals, a combined usage of one or more broadcast tuners, the broadband interface, and the local storage device is therefore required. In this paper, we discuss how the interaction of these devices can be managed in order to allow for the live and time-shifted delivery of TV content via dynamically changing distribution channels. Further, a demonstrator of a user terminal is presented, which allows the interruption-free presentation of TV services in a Dynamic Broadcast environment, where live as well as time-shifted content delivery mechanisms are in use.

Beschreibung: The field of Consumer TV has developed rapidly in the last years. The new user terminals (TV set and Set-top-box) are increasingly equipped with multiple network connection interfaces (broadcast, WiFi, USB etc.) as well as built-in storage. In this paper, we utilized these features to optimize the operation of broadcast networks and to make the use of the valuable broadcast spectrum more efficient. We developed the architecture of the dynamic broadcast system, in which the TV content can be flexibly transmitted via both broadcast and broadband networks, in both real-time and non-real-time fashion, and the transmission parameters in the broadcast network can also be modified dynamically. To examine the benefits that the proposed techniques can provide we simulated the content delivery scheduling with realistic TV program data and transmission cost models. The scheduling problem was solved using integer linear programming and our findings showed that dynamic broadcast can reduce the TV programs’ delivery cost and increase the efficiency of spectrum usage at the same time. The freed data rate/spectrum can be utilized to deliver more services, or to adjust the broadcast network settings to reduce power consumption, or even be leased to secondary wireless communication networks. A possible architecture of a dynamic broadcast user terminal is also presented in this paper.