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Research areas: Digital Convergence | Advanced Testing | Healthcare | Networking | Sensors

Offerings: iCGW | Infosys myMedia | myNet and Falcon | iNaaS | MCOA


iCGW: Digital convergence

Telecom Operators (Telcos) today are transforming their network and service infrastructure to provide quadruple play (voice, video, data and mobile). To monetize their investments, Telcos today need interesting applications that can be offered to their subscribers. Over the years, most interesting applications started out as web-based applications.

Convergence Gateway

For example, video sharing applications, such as YouTube; social networking applications such as Facebook–all have their roots on the Internet. This is because the barrier to entry for developing and deploying new applications on the web is negligibly small, compared to doing the same on mobile and/ or television networks. This is because access to mobile and television networks are very tightly controlled by the service provider and the technology to deliver a similar experience is in its nascent stage.

When an application becomes successful on the web, Telcos would like to replicate some of the applications on their mobile and television networks as well. But, due to the wide gap in the technology supported by PC, Mobile and TV, it is difficult to reproduce the applications. Therefore, instead of replicating them, operators should think about providing limited but easy-to-use versions of PC-based applications on TV and Mobile so as to address specific needs of subscribers.

One way of achieving this objective is to write an application for the web, mobile and TV platforms separately. The other way is to use a 'User Interface Transformation Engine' (UITE) to produce a web, mobile and television version of the application depending on where the request is coming from.

The first approach is likely to have the best quality because applications are developed from scratch keeping the requirements and constraints of the platforms on which they will be deployed. However, Telcos must bear in mind that such an approach will weigh heavily on resources and reflect on time-to-market as well. But the second approach can significantly reduce costs and time.

In addition to providing a uniform user interface experience to the user on three screens, it is also necessary to trans-code content (media) when played on a specific end-user device. This component is referred to as 'Media Transformation Engine' (MTE).

UITE and MTE together constitute what is referred to as the Convergence Gateway that not only provides a contextually relevant user interface to a subscriber, but also helps in transforming media into device supported format.

So, when a subscriber opens the browser on his/ her device and keys-in the URL for accessing an application, the subsystem responsible for servicing the request detects the kind of device, processes the request accordingly and delivers user interface and media that is best suitable for display on the device.

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