While IPTV architecture and user interfaces have received a lot of interest in recent years much less focus has been given to the issues of channel surfing in the IPTV era. IPTV is rapidly transitioning from a Telco solution into a generic service over any broadband access network. Traffic issues that relate to channel change are moving to the mainstream and are the talk of a number of standards organizations. This paper proposes a new approach to channel change. It uses peering and viewing statistics to reduce channel change delays and improve the user quality of experience.

Any technology requires some number of key design decisions. In the case of the ATM user plane, the choices to use fixed length, 53 byte cells and virtual connections were unorthodox from the perspective of many in the networking research community. This paper attempts a technical justification for those design decisions.