Internet Protocol television
Usually sold and run by a telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live television that is streamed over the Internet (multicast) — in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable transmission formats — as well as video on demand services for watching or replaying content (unicast).
[4] IPTV normally requires the use of a set-top box, which receives the encoded television content in the MPEG transport stream via IP multicast, and converts the packets to be watched on a TV set or other kind of display.
These services are delivered across an access agnostic, packet switched network that employs the IP protocol to transport the audio, video and control signals.
In contrast to video over the public Internet, with IPTV deployments, network security and performance are tightly managed to ensure a superior entertainment experience, resulting in a compelling business environment for content providers, advertisers and customers alike.
VOD services were only made possible as a result of two major technological developments: motion-compensated DCT video compression and asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) data transmission.
[31] Bell further announced in the September 13th (2010) press release it would begin deploying fiber optic Ethernet to homes in Montreal and Toronto.
Manbang allows viewers to watch five different TV channels in real-time, and find political information regarding the Supreme Leader and Juche ideology, and read articles from state-run news organizations.
[33] Services also launched in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Canada, Croatia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco,[34] North Macedonia, Poland, Mongolia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia,[35] the Netherlands,[36] Georgia, Greece, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary,[37][38] Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Latvia, Turkey, Colombia, Chile and Uzbekistan.
Kazakhstan introduced[42] its own IPTV services by the national provider Kazakhtelecom JSC[43] and content integrator Alacast under the "iD TV" brand in two major cities Astana and Almaty in 2009 and is about to go nationwide starting 2010.
[citation needed] In the Philippines, PLDT offers Cignal IPTV services as an add-on in certain ADSL and fiber optic plans.
HyppTV was supposed to use an IPTV-based system, but not true IPTV as it does not provide a set-top box and requires users to view channels using a computer.
In April 2011, Astro commercially launched its IPTV services under the tag line "The One and Only Line You'll Ever Need", a triple play offering in conjunction with TIME dotCom Berhad that provides all the Astro programming via IPTV, together with voice telephone services and broadband Internet access all through the same fibre optic connection into the customer's home.
IPTV has been widely used since around 2002[citation needed] to distribute television and audio-visual (AV) media around businesses and commercial sites, whether as live TV channels or Video on Demand (VOD).
An IPTV head-end is a place where live TV channels and AV sources are encoded, encrypted, and delivered as IP multicast streams.
[49] In many cases, the residential gateway that provides connectivity with the Internet access network is not located close to the IPTV set-top box.
There is a growing standardisation effort on the use of the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as an architecture for supporting IPTV services in telecommunications carrier networks.
IPTV is largely neutral to the transmission medium, and IP traffic is already routinely carried by satellite for Internet backbone trunking and corporate VSAT networks.
[56] The copper twisted pair cabling that forms the last mile of the telephone and broadband network in many countries is not able to provide a sizeable proportion of the population with an IPTV service that matches even existing terrestrial or satellite digital TV distribution.
[58] Hybrid IPTV refers to the combination of traditional broadcast TV services and video delivered over either managed IP networks or the public Internet.
A hybrid set-top allows content from a range of sources, including terrestrial broadcast, satellite, and cable, to be brought together with video delivered over the Internet via an Ethernet connection on the device.
This enables television viewers to access a greater variety of content on their TV sets, without the need for a separate box for each service.
From a pay-TV operator's perspective, a hybrid IPTV set-top box gives them greater long-term flexibility to deploy new services and applications as and when consumers require, most often without the need to upgrade equipment or for a technician to visit and reconfigure or swap out the device.
This can provide a huge selection of channels to subscribers without overburdening incoming Internet to the POP, and enables an IPTV service to be offered to small or remote operators outside the reach of terrestrial high-speed WAN connection.
They also may be able to access photos or music from their PC on their television, use a wireless phone to schedule a recording of their favourite show, or even adjust parental controls so their child can watch a documentary for a school report, while they're away from home.
IPTV technology is used for video on demand (VOD),[66] which permits a customer to browse an online programme or film catalogue, to watch trailers and to then select a program.
Within businesses and institutions, IPTV eliminates the need to run a parallel infrastructure to deliver live and stored video services.
The last-mile delivery for IPTV usually has a bandwidth restriction that only allows a small number of simultaneous TV channel streams – typically from one to three – to be delivered.
Existing DVB TV channels that simulcast by both terrestrial and satellite transmissions experience the same 0.25-second delay difference between the two services with no detrimental effect, and it goes unnoticed by viewers.
Some major telecoms vendors are active in this space, notably Accenture (Accenture Video Solution), Alcatel-Lucent (sometimes working with Movistar TV), Ericsson (notably since acquiring Tandberg Television), Huawei, NEC, PTCL Smart TV, Sri Lanka Telecom, Thomson, and ZTE, as are some IT houses, led by Microsoft.
Miami-based AlphaOTT, Tokyo-based The New Media Group, Malaysian-based Select-TV, Oslo/Norway-based SnapTV, and California-based UTStarcom, Inc. also offer end-to-end networking infrastructure for IPTV-based services, and Hong Kong-based BNS Ltd. provides turnkey open platform IPTV technology solutions.
