What are the emerging trends and technologies for catch-up and time-shift features in IPTV?

This is for quite some time main approach to realise DVR services in modern IPTV solutions. It is important to mention that also ABR technologies are more often used in IPTV solutions. Together ABR and Cloud DVR makes whole system a little more sophisticated however gives immediate possibility to serve multiscreen with consistent services. It is sometimes limited by licensing but luckily it gets better and better as the technology proves to be more robust and safe for content rights. There is also a slight compliant from advertisers however again technology can turn this around and give new advertisement opportunities on recorded content with much bigger flexibility than before possible.

This became standard for payTV services already - at least when it comes to any device, any quality, any where. Good again is the easiness which comes with ABR deployments where all screens can be fed with one source streams just delivered smart ways. Even mixture between Multicast and ABR allows to deliver much better quality services currently when big part of headend can be shared and transcoding systems became superb when it comes to quality. I’m huge fan of interactive platforms which combine multiple content access within TV services. However it is still not so often you can find well designed and deployed platforms with those interactivity features made their way to everyday usage level. Belive we see more and more of those.

That is all true and as i mentioned before more and more systems turns toward ABR. However there is from perspective of infrastructure one factor important to point. Multicast is giving less traffic on backbone than unicast. In some networks this is hard to keep bandwidth availability for peak hours when using unicast. Another point is delay/latency which is addressable in ABR with Low Latency but still demand a little more effort. Advantages are much bigger and in many scenarios it is best choice to go with ABR. Stability and resilience for ABR is by design much better which makes over all user experience better.

As it comes to generative content it is trend and it is important to watch however at this level in my opinion AI can generate more of this additional content around series or movies to make this interactivity attractive and useful.

Very very interesting aspect of IPTV where quite obviously AI can and is able to generate much better recommendations. So called content discovery is possible to change the way of watching and consuming content from the platform by which make user experience even better. Another aspect is of course more ways to monetise content by provider or engage more with upsell cross-sell campaigns thanks to that kind of mechanisms. AI is in my opinion game changer when it comes to UX - it can analyze behaviour and eliminate or adjust parameters of the streams to make user satisfaction on highest levels.