The Evolution of Over the Top (OTT): Standardization, Key Players and Challenges

OTT users has gained momentum through the evolution of low cost smart TV and other consumer electronic, open nature of Internet, and ever growing contents. Among consumer electronics, Smart TV with Web 2.0 features integration has given OTT service a wider range of audience through bigger screen. This has replaced broadcast TV, cable TV and IPTV models. Motivated by this scenario of OTT services, we studied standardization activities of different key players including Content Providers (CP), Cloud/Content Distribution Network (CDN), Consumer Electronics (CE) and Internet Service Provider (ISPs) in TV market space. We have summarized several key challenges for OTT services from ISPs point of view for ex, single sign on for multiple OTT, scalability, heavy tail content availability, live TV etc. We also analyzed the suitability of the next-generation Internet architectures, in particular, Content-Centric Networking (CCN), Open Cache and Multicast Adaptive Bitrate (mABR) for OTT service delivery from ISP point of view.