IPTV – Ready to Takeoff

Ten years after the initial hype of TV services over broadband networks, IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) is poised to takeoff in a big way. Forecasts show that more than 20 million households will subscribe to IPTV services by 2007-08. How does the end consumer benefit? What aspects have changed this time around in terms of technology and market conditions to enable such large-scale adoption? What is the end-to-end chain involved in the deployment of such services and who are the major players? Is India likely to join the bandwagon and who are the early players? How is Ittiam, as a key DSP intellectual property provider in the multimedia area, positioned to play a role?
What is IPTV?
IPTV is a service to provide broadcast, on-demand, and interactive content to end consumers over broadband networks operating using the Internet protocol. It typically targets the convergence of voice, data, and television services (typically called as triple-play) by a single service provider. Channel change and VCR-like functionalities are carried out over the back channel on edge network servers.
End–user advantages
Compared to conventional consumption of TV content over cable/satellite/terrestrial, IPTV enables true video-on-demand. Content can be consumed any time and anywhere, as opposed to watching one’s favorite programs at a scheduled time and a scheduled place. Similarly, content sourced anywhere in the world can be watched, giving virtually unlimited choice in content viewing experience. As opposed to pay-per-view or near-VoD, the content can be played in multiple ways as a DVD can be played. The trip to the local video rental store will be completely replaced. With the advent of devices such as PVR (personal video recorders), content can be recorded and watched as many times. The availability of a back channel enables several novel interactive applications such as the ability to learn more about a particular movie or program, purchasing a particular item just seen in a commercial, etc. The back channel also enables applications such as instant video messaging, video chats, and interactive gaming with friends and family.
Reasons for earlier failure
Though touted as a killer application in the mid to late ‘90s, video-on-demand (VoD) did not happen then due to various reasons. The primary reason was the lack of broadband penetration/adoption and the lack of last-mile infrastructure such as high-bandwidth DSL lines to the homes, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) or fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC). The quality of video that could be offered over the then existing last-mile solutions using the then existing MPEG-2 technology was not acceptable. Though content delivery networks (CDNs) such as those of Akamai and Ibeam became popular in the late nineties by solving the best effort delivery nature of the Internet, entertainment quality content was not available mostly due to lack of end-to-end content protection mechanisms. There were no standards or de-facto proprietary standards for equipments from multiple vendors in the end-to-end chain to interoperate with each other. The limited bandwidth and lack of server scalability with the number of users impacted the response time for interactive commands. For example, a simple fast-forward command used to involve a considerable re-buffering delay of 1 or 2 seconds.
Recent technology enablers
The key problems of video quality and last-mile bandwidth have been attacked in parallel. New standards such as H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) have been shown to provide the same quality as MPEG-2 at less than half the bit-rate. Proprietary standards such as Microsoft’s Window Media Video 9 (WMV9) also claim a similar reduction in bit-rate. A bit-rate of close to 1.5Mbps is now sufficient for TV-quality video transmission. DSL technology that offered an average bandwidth of 500kbps to end-customers has seen several advances to the level of today having multi-Mbps bandwidths to customers that can support simultaneous data and multi-channel audiovisual services.

Cable modems, compliant with the DOCSIS standards, boast data-rates of the order of 10Mbps downstream. Robust Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions have been developed to protect the use of the content at various stages in the end-to-end chain that have given the content providers enough confidence to release quality content. IETF (internet engineering task force) has standardized the carriage of content over RTP (real-time transport protocol) for multicast and unicast through its RFCs (request for comments). Forums such as ISMA (internet streaming media alliance) have standardized compliant streaming and have organized plug-fests to ensure interoperability across multi-vendor appliances. Companies such as Microsoft have developed complete end-to-end proprietary streaming specifications to support broadcast, VoD, and progressive downloads. By exploiting the surplus bandwidth, the response time to interactive commands have been reduced by bursting the re-buffering data at a higher than average bit-rate. All these technology advances have resulted in a much better quality and user experience, bringing them on par with those of cable/satellite/terrestrial broadcast.

Recent market enablers
Cable companies with their data services over cable modem and the adoption of VoIP (voice over IP) started to take a larger market share away from the telecommunication companies (telcos). However, the cable companies suffer from the scalability problem that the bandwidth is shared across all subscribers. Telcos have the advantage of providing each subscriber with an assured bandwidth using the dedicated twisted pair from the central office. With regulatory regimes being different for cable services and communication services, telcos started to look for ways to provide TV services. Though the DSL channel is asymmetric, the upstream bandwidth is sufficient to carry on services such as video messaging and video phones as well. With reliable DRM technology, access to content that is key to enable the IPTV service became less of an issue.

The IPTV offers a whole new revenue stream to the content providers. For the service providers, in addition to generation of additional revenue through value added services possible over IP, targeted advertising is another big revenue source. Also, newer communication companies that did not have the existing twisted copper lines have laid fiber to the curb in major metropolitan areas, realizing the revenue potential of the triple play. Several field trials have been conducted in the US, Canada, Europe, the UK, Korea, and China to iron out details of deployment and usage patterns.



End-to-end IPTV deployment chain
The end-to-end deployment chain involves several players starting from content providers, content encoders, content servers, content delivery networks, edge servers, IP STB hardware providers, IP STB middleware providers, to IPTV service providers that finally interact with the end consumer. Complete head-end equipments taking care of encoding, transcoding or trans-rating, and server functions are available from companies such as Harmonic, Tandberg, Kasenna, Cisco, and Minerva. Notable IP-STB box-makers include Kreatel communications, i3micro, and Humax. Microsoft has formulated an end-to-end strategy for IPTV deployment in terms of content encoding, streamable file formats, streaming protocols, and windows based IP-STB framework to provide a rich TV viewing experience. Orca Interactive is another company that provides complete software solutions to IPTV service providers that allow them to readily deploy and manage IPTV services.

IPTV in India
Compared to the countries mentioned earlier, India does not have very high broadband penetration. The DSL services deployed support only up to 256kbps to a vast majority. However, companies such as Reliance Infocomm and Tata Indicom (which owns VSNL) have laid extensive fiber networks in major metropolitan cities. Reports of Reliance’s foray into IPTV and its trials with Microsoft’s IPTV solution have been around since 2003. Similarly, partnership announcement between Cisco and VSNL to provide IPTV services to the corporate and residential broadband customers was made in 2004. This year has opened with announcements of netTV trails by Atlas Interactive in the NewDelhi area which has partnered with BSNL. MTNL also has partnered with Ericsson to provide broadband access in the Delhi and Mumbai by upgrading to ADSL2+ technology. Entertainment has traditionally been a big industry in India as evidenced by the TV installations that surpass the combined landline and mobile phone installed base; the huge consumer market that India offers is propelling the TV industry through advertisement revenues. The same kind of revolution that happened in the early 90’s with the shift from Government operated terrestrial television to cable TV can happen in the late 200x with the shift to IPTV from broadcast TV. Low-cost indigenous IP-STBs, mass-manufactured in India, would facilitate the adoption faster and would provide an equal footing with Cable STBs and DTH-STBs.