The Smart Telephony System (STS) is a telephony service for ambient home environments. As the name says it acts as a telephony system by connecting different devices and allowing specific services.  It allows splitting, distributing and merging of media streams offered by used services to overcome the problem that a service is usually bound to a specific end device and a location. Besides seamless media stream distribution, it offers several functions for the cloning and transcoding of a stream to improve the benefit. Integrating a media gateway the functionality is hidden to the outside of the environment. To allow functions like Follow-Me (the user walks through his house and the conversation follows him automatically) the system integrates -besides normal SIP phones- other multimedia devices supporting protocols like UPnP or DLNA.

STS provides the following features:

• enabling VoIP through SIP
• offering a user interface for controlling the communication
• integrating multimedia devices like webcam, speakers or television
• supporting media functions like stream- cloning and -transfer

In the context of IPTV the STS realizes all media stream functions for a TV channel, i.e. switching or cloning the channel to other devices. Moreover it could separate audio- and video-stream and distribute them individually to different devices for enabling new scenarios or use cases.