IPTV Overcoming challenges

To date, little attention has been paid to the costs of providing the bandwidth needed to make IPTV happen, says BOB AUGER, from IT consultancy Newmérique. Delivering a feature film on IPTV that look as good as the same title on standard DVD will present a significant challenge, for HD format discs, it’s no contest.

Once upon a time, knowledge was in the head of the storytellers. You heard it, remembered it, repeated it – probably with a few embellishments – and passed the word around. Access to this information was free. Then, someone invented writing (Storytell 2.0, as it was known at the time).

Writing was the first effective storage medium for ideas and it started a revolution. Copies could be made, although unlike the earlier shareware version, scribes had to be paid to do the work. The storyteller could now pass on his tale without having to be physically present. By the time the Chinese invented moveable types and Johannes Gutenberg came up with the printing press, the stage was set for the introduction of packaged media (the book) and the arrival of the ‘two-for-one’ special offer.

First books, then cylinders, shellac discs, LPs, CDs, cassettes and DVDs became essential elements of everyday living. More space was needed to store all this paper, vinyl, plastic and polycarbonate. Forests were planted to feed the demand for paper, and cut down to create teak shelves. Oil wells and refineries diverted from production of fuel to creating the polymers needed to make plastics. Whole industries sprang up to print books, press discs and duplicate tapes and we all paid increasingly large sums of money for access to the information contained in all this packaging.

Single-handedly, the Home Entertainment Industry came to be held responsible for the environmental crisis and for global warming. Fortunately – some would say just in time – Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) came to the rescue and today every home can access the world’s information and entertainment archive through a high-speed broadband connection…

Or so it should be, though the outcome described above could be some time coming. IPTV has arrived for a fortunate few in test markets – at a price and in densely populated areas where high-speed connections are viable. If you happen to live in a rural area, you are probably several miles and some years away from access to an IPTV service.

One of the major hurdles for IPTV operators to overcome is a lack of understanding among consumers as to what it actually is. IPTV is not ‘TV-over-the-Internet’, as offered by the BBC iPlayer or 4oD from the UK’s Channel Four. Nor is it the same as using your PC to watch video on Internet sites like YouTube or Joost. IPTV is a continuously available TV service that is sent directly to a set-top box at your (IP) address, from where it can be displayed on any screen in the home.

IPTV allows ‘couch potato’ mode (lie back and watch) or à la carte viewing (create your own channel) and the range of past and present news and entertainment on offer should far exceed the restricted offerings from traditional broadcasters. Freed from the tyranny of channel hopping, everything you want to watch can appear through a single fast broadband connection. Picture quality matches that available from digital satellite or cable, as long as at least 6Mbps is available.

Well, that is what is claimed by the PR handouts. In fact, if more than one user is attached to the same connection, as when members of the same household try to watch sport and a movie at the same time, the bandwidth has to be shared. Current DSL technology just can’t cope.

Talk of the ‘high-speed Internet’ has led to renewed interest in fibre. Corning Glass, for many years a leader in fibre optics, has just re-opened one of the fibre production plants that it mothballed when the dotcom bubble burst, thanks in part to the need for ‘Fibre to the Home’ if IPTV is ever to succeed commercially. It will take some time to bury all that glass under the ground however, even assuming the money can be found to finance it, and meantime copper networks are bursting at the seams as DSL struggles to keep up.

Can TV-over-the-Internet and IPTV really threaten the established broadcast and packaged media markets? The constraints are both financial and technical. Along with greater compression and increased bandwidth to the home, the public expectation of video quality has changed. The newly-acquired HD-ready flat screen TVs reveal how poor the standard definition digital TV picture can be, even at the relatively generous bitrates of mainstream channels.

For broadband operators it is like trying to hit a moving target. Just as conventional TV at acceptable quality looks achievable over DSL, HDTV comes along to spoil the party with much greater bandwidth requirements. Claims that acceptable HDTV can be delivered at 6 Mbps look unwise when HD discs like Blu-ray and HD DVD are offering two or three times the data rate. As a speaker at the IPTV World Forum 2007 in London said “If it costs more than a postage stamp to deliver a movie over broadband, stick it in the mail.”

The IP Development Network produced an opinion document entitled HDTV over IP: Who pays the bill? which confronts the bandwidth issue head-on. ‘It costs the same for Amazon to mail a CD as an HD DVD,’ says the report, yet Internet delivery means that streaming an HD DVD is likely to cost up to a hundred times more. The minimum ‘real’ cost of delivering a two-hour HD feature film over a UK broadband network is calculated at around £2.10 (€3 or $4 at the time of writing). If an HD file is streamed individually to each user, the cost rises to an astonishing £22 per instance, which is clearly unsustainable. Although these figures may be open to dispute, the document reveals that the idea of ‘free’ downloads over the Internet is deeply flawed.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as BitTorrent and LimeWire, spread the load by linking together every user with a copy of the file on their PC. Until recently this technology was more closely associated with illegal copying than with the distribution of HDTV content, but it is a sign of the times that perfectly legitimate businesses, including the VOIP network Skype, now incorporate P2P in their delivery mechanism.

‘It is clear that flat-rate pricing models will not work’ says the report. ISPs will either cap Power Users (an increasing proportion of the population) at a relatively low number of gigabytes each month or move subscribers to a variable pricing model based on the bandwidth they use.

A new arrival on the scene, CacheLogic, aims to provide a service for content owners that combines central control with P2P distribution. In their view, content delivery is based on business models that were created for the early days of the Internet. Pricing models based on bandwidth (Mbps) or traffic (GB) do not relate delivery cost to top line revenue.

CacheLogic's Asset Delivery Framework is poised to revolutionize the economics of Internet content delivery by combining the technologies of traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) with the peer-to-peer methods of distribution techniques like BitTorrent and Limewire. The company is able to promise content owners that they only pay for complete delivery of programmes; unlike their competitors, there is no charge for partial downloads or failed delivery.

To date, very little attention has been paid to the costs of providing the bandwidth needed to make IPTV happen. There is a big difference between streaming a 60-second clip from YouTube at low resolution and providing a 24/7 TV service that will match broadcast television.

The viewer doesn’t care how many technical hurdles have been overcome to get the picture to the home, as long as the promised soap or sporting event arrives on time and looks at least as good through IPTV as with the service they are watching at the moment.

Belatedly, potential IPTV operators have woken up to the challenge of delivering a picture requiring four times the data rate of standard definition TV. Some operators go so far as to claim that HDTV is a big opportunity for the technology, since terrestrial and satellite broadcasters with a fixed resource available face the dilemma of providing fewer channels (which means lower revenues) or offering a limited HDTV programme choice.

DVD has always offered much more bandwidth than broadcast digital television, whether from satellite or Freeview, and the 6 Mbps referred to above as the target for HD IPTV has been the norm for DVDs from launch in 1997. Combined with line-doubling techniques, any good DVD produced over the last ten years can look fine on an HD-ready screen.

Delivering a feature film on IPTV that look as good as the same title on standard DVD will present a significant challenge, for HD format discs, it’s no contest.

Talk of improved codecs that require much less bandwidth and the ability to deliver Blu-ray or HD DVD picture quality at a quarter of the present bandwidth comes more from the sales department than from the technical teams. Yes, codecs have improved, but not as much as some would like us to believe.

Unfortunately, the existing, creaking, copper telephone system is all most of us can afford to access at the moment, so the elimination of physical media remains a dream. The IPTV storyteller’s tale is still embellished and with repetition, copywriters continue to add a favourable spin to the truth and environmentalists dream of a world free of the need to recycle paper and plastic.

However long it may be before information and entertainment escapes from the confines of physical media, one fact is certain – access to it is not going to be free!...

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