IPTV and the Future - How it works

IPTV will work in a way very similar to how digital cable does now. You take the frame of the video and chop it up into tiny pieces. Then you smash it in a small box and shoot it through miles of cable to your house. Then your cable box unscrambles it and displays the video onto your TV. IPTV will do much the same, except it will run through your Internet connection instead of your cable connection.

It sounds simple so far; there's not much going on here compared to a typical cable TV network. The problem really comes into play with the local hub, where the ads are all inserted and sent to your home. After the company fine tunes your viewing pleasure with ads, they will shoot it into a network in the form of IP packets. The challenge is getting all the packets on time and organized to be descrambled and put up on your TV as a picture. There are roughly 30 frames in a second of video. If a packet is ½ a second late, it’s 15 frames in the past.

If this was the only thing going through a network, your ISP would have been selling you IPTV long ago, hoping you would ditch the cable and satellite for them instead. Once you put those packets onto the network, they are competing with millions of other packets going through at the same time. You can see people surfing the Internet, downloading movies off torrents, people streaming video, VoIP connections and the list goes on, all swimming down the stream of IP packets in any network.

It’s all about quality of service. It’s much better to have to wait two seconds for a file to download than to wait for the rest of that TV picture to come though the network. With the Internet in full bloom now, it’s hard to jump into a river of data and tell all the TV signals that it can use this special stream to move more quickly than anything else. Web 2.0 hopes to help prioritize packets.

You may have that fast 7.0 MB/s Internet connection and think that it is enough, but when you involve video, 7 MB/sec won’t cut it for standard TV signals, let alone HD. In reality, you will be looking at 2-3 MB/sec for the signal of a TV channel to be sent to your home. That’s per channel, not for all of them; I doubt that all the TVs in your house are on the same channel very often, especially if you have children. You’re looking at two channels max that you can have running in your house. That new HDTV looks amazing in HD, doesn’t it? Chalk up 20 MB/sec for an HD channel. You’ll need three Internet connections to broadcast one HD channel. And let's not even consider what happens if you're one of those people who likes to web surf while watching TV! Before we see this hitting the mainstream, we need to see  Internet connections go turbo.

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