Digital Home: An architecture for easy administration and updates of services

Abstract

In the last years digital home solutions have made their entry and are are now becoming mainstream. From a service provider's point of view, this creates an interesting opportunity. Today, if a service provider wishes to change the services offered, the flash memory of the customers' Set-Top Boxes must be updated or the Set-Top Boxes must perhaps be replaced for larger updates. Replacing the Set-Top Box is both costly and time consuming. As digital home solutions become more normal, it is possible to use such a system to offer services. This way adding, removing or updating a service can be done in software only. Our proposed architecture does this, and with minimal involvment of the customers. The architecture offers a generic interface, providing for third party development. As the world gets more and more digitalized, the expectation of everything to be availabe from everywere gets more common. Our architecture lets a service provider offer their customers remote access to, and control of, their digital home. We have based our system on Microsoft Media Center Edition. This was chosen after first studying the concept of an ideal digital home and then researching which existing digital home solution would bring us closest to this ideal situation.