Identity Management for IMS-Based IPTV

IPTV as an integral part of triple play service offers is regarded as a major differentiation factor by incumbent telecommunication operators. However, as more operators provide these services, differentiation is fading. Analysts agree that the key to differentiation are value added services which in the long term require business collaborations of incumbents and 3rd party Service Providers. Additional value is added by integrating existing and well known Internet services into those service portfolios. In this paper, we present how Identity Management technology can simplify the setup of these collaborations and enhance the user experience by secure, anonymous and seamless service usage, e.g. by providing Single Sign On and pseudonyms. We furthermore detail an architecture that combines IPTV based on the IP-Multimedia Subsystem with Identity Management to offer consumers a comfortable, privacy aware access to value added services. Especially in the context of IPTV, these are important attributes to reach a high and sustainable user acceptance.