A flexible product management system for the IPTV service

As the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) technology advances, IPTV services and customers increase. To attract more customers to raise profits, IPTV service providers usually launch many kinds of sales plans at the same time. Each sales plan has its own billing processing program so that the service subscription events are properly charged. Traditionally, sales plans are packaged case by case and billing processing programs are designed individually. However, the labor cost and time requirement augment as the number of sales plans increases. Therefore, how to gain working efficiency is obviously an important issue. In this paper, we propose a product management system that systematizes the packaging and programming procedure. The system, developed in modules, is flexible in the sense that similar sales plans, e.g. the plan of buy 3 get 1 free and the plan of buy 4 get 2 free, can be packaged by the same module with different parameter assignment. Existing packaging modules are reusable and new packaging modules can be added when needed. With the product management system, IPTV service providers can reduce their maintenance cost significantly.