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IPTV Overview Part 1

Category: IPTV, Multicast
Author: gokhankosem, on 29 Jul 12 - 0 Comments

IPTV Overview
IPTV with its long name Internet Protocol Television is a television system that this service is delivered using
the IP suite over a packet-switched network like internet. Traditionally, the television system is delivered
through terrestrial , cable tv or satellite. But IPTV is different than these traditional techniques.

IPTV looks like the same with Internet TV. There is also Internet TV as you know. But there are many
differencies between IPTV and Internet TV. Do not confuse!

IPTV has a good QoS and delivered over a managed network. We can give Vitgin TV and BT Vision as an
example for the IPTV service. Beside, Internet TV has no guaranteed QoS and usually delivered on
unmanaged network/open internet. Youtube is a good example for Internet TV.

We can classify IPTV services into three groups.These are:

Live television : Watching at the same time with the world.

Time-shifted television : Recording and watching television whenever you want.
Video on Demand(VoD) : Watching recorded videos , not television.

IPTV Key Protocols

HTTP > Request and Response > Firefox,Internet Explorer

RSTP > Play,pause,record > Real Player, Windows Media Player
IGMP > Connecting to the multicast stream(TV channel), Changing from one channel to another

Multicast and Unicast IPTV

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We can divide the delivery of the IPTV, into two types. One is multicast IPTV and the other is unicast IPTV .
With multicast IPTV, the same content is delivered to the multiple receivers. And with unicast IPTV, different
content is delivered to every receiver.

Multicast on IPTV

In this delivery type, the TV content is sent to many subscribers at the same time . With multicast delivery,
the bandwidth is saved, since, only one stream is transmitted over the network. When ever a server multicasts
data to the clients, it sends this data to the correspondingrouter only once.

IPTV does not broadcast to a user all channels at the same time. It divides the channels into groups and sends to
each user the group that contains the requested channel. The user can also switch between channels.

Unicast on IPTV

IPTV sends a given TV content to a given user. The typical unicast service in IPTV is VoD(Video on
Demand). With unicast type, you can nort save bandwidth, because the server must send different content to
each user.

QoE (Quality of Experience)

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While talking about IPTV, itis important to tell something about QoE. QoE(Quality of Experience) is also
known as Quality of User Experience. QoE is a subjective measure of a customers experience with a
service like web browsing, TV broadcast, etc.

QoE system will try ro measure metrics that customer will directly perceive as a qualit parameter. For example it
can be the played time for a TV channel on user TV.

QoE is different from QoS. It is related but different. QoS is attempsts to measure objectively the service
delivered by the vendor. QoS generally not related with customer. For example QoS used to reduce jitter by
vendor. But a user never says that the jitter is too high.

For this article that is at all. To learn more about IPTV, read the second part ;) We will continue with the IPTV
System Components and IPTV Network Design.

IPTV Overview Part 1

IPTV Overview Part 2

About the Author

Gokhan Kosem is a telecommunation and network engineer. His ambition
to IP networks and end-to-end system installation made him to prepare
this web-site. By sharing his experiences about various networking
protocols beside different system installation experiences and Cisco,
Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent devices configurations, he is aimed to be helpful for
his collegues in all over the world. He is currently lives in Istanbul, Turkey.

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