Alternative Monitoring Approach for IPTV

Abstract

IPTV emerged in the late 1990s as a solution for delivering Video on Demand (VoD) and live television over managed networks. Its widespread adoption accelerated after the expansion of broadband internet and the introduction of web technologies such as HTML5 and adaptive streaming protocols (MPEG-DASH and HLS), which enabled television content to be streamed directly through web browsers. Across Europe, major operators and platforms including Vivacom and A1 in Bulgaria, Zattoo, Molotov TV, Cosmote TV, and Waipu.tv have successfully adopted browser-based and OTT television services. The proposed solution is designed to collect IPTV viewership data while supporting remote device management. Its architecture includes a Chromium-based browser controlled through Selenium Wire, enabling the monitoring of network traffic and playback events. Additional components include a user management interface for collecting demographic information, utility tools for software deployment, inventory tracking and log processing, a secure data transmission module, and VPN-based remote administration. The study highlights a key challenge in IPTV audience measurement: The widespread use of end-to-end encryption, which limits traditional monitoring methods. Existing approaches typically rely either on cooperation with IPTV providers to access proprietary data or on computer-vision techniques that identify channels after the content has been decoded. Both approaches involve considerable technical, legal, and financial challenges. The proposed solution addresses these limitations by operating as a native IPTV client on standard consumer hardware. This enables the independent collection of multimedia metadata and playback information without bypassing the existing security mechanisms, thereby providing a provider-independent approach that can be evaluated for scalability in future work.