Project Description:
Maing goal is to enable iPhone application to control IPTV instead of remote control. End user can control and manage same IPTV functions with iPhone as with the standard TV remote control. This project is to develop demo application, simulating this approach, so not all of the remote control functions needs to be implemented.
iPhone application is divided in three parts:
- settings menu: setings like IP address of the IPTV server, id of the IPTV user, names of the TV channels and all other parameters needed for application to work... are defined here
- LiveTV menu: livetv channels are shown with name of the current program showing on the channel. Choosing the channel changes to this channels on the TV. Additionaly, user can check complete program guide for that channels with other command. Desing of this menu should be user friendly, fancy, well designed, suitable for demo purposes
- Remote control menu: basic remote controls like on the standard remote control are graphicaly shown here allowing to demonstrate concept of controling IPTV from the iPhone. Controls used are: numbers (1-9, 0) up, down, left, right, menu button, epg button, standby button, red button, yellow button, green button, blue button, play/pause button, stop button, fastforward button, fastbackward button.
Application gets relevant IPTV information from the IPTV server and sends required commands for controling IPTV to the same server. Based on the user id, IPTV server forwards these commands to the appropriate STB. Communication is realized over IP, directly between iPhone and IPTV server. Iphone uses WiFi connection for this purpose. Information and commands are exchanged using web services which are already available on the IPTV server.
One web service is used to get EPG information for chosed channel. You put in channel id and get back complete epg information. Second web service is used for sending remote control commands to the IPTV server for particular user. Commands are defined as key strokes on the "standard" remote control. e.g. for changing TV channels, number of that channel should be send via web service to the IPTV server.
Building same application for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian is major advantage. In case this demo application is succesfull, we can extend the scope of the project to additional features.
