Internet television (otherwise known as
Internet TV,
Catch-up TV or
Online TV) is
television
service distributed via the
Internet.
It has
become very popular at the end of the first decade of the 21st
century due to services such as the BBC
iPlayer (in and limited to the United Kingdom
) and Hulu (limited to the
United
States
); see List of Internet
television providers.
Concept
Internet television allows its users to choose the program or the
TV show they want to watch from an archive of programs or from a
channel directory. The 2 forms of viewing Internettelevision are
streaming the content directly to a media player or simply
downloading the program/show onto the users computer. With the "TV
on Demand" market growing, these on demand websites or applications
are a must have for major televison broadcasters. For example the
BBC's iPlayer brings in users which stream more than One Million
videos per week, with one of the BBc's headline shows "The
Apprentice" taking over 3 - 5% of the Uk's internet traffic due to
people watching the first episode on iPlayer.
Every night the use of On Demand TV peaks at around 10pm, Most
providers of the service provide several different formats and
quality controls so that the service can be viewed on many
different devices. Some services now offer a HD service along side
their SD, streaming is the same but offers the quality of HD to the
device being used, as long as it is using a HD screen. During Peak
times the BBC's iPlayer sends out 12GB (Gigabytes) worth of
information a second, around the same as sending out 20 DVDs
content per second.Over the course of a month the iPlayer sends out
& Petabytes of information which is the same as 11 Million
Dvd's content. This wide use of on demand serivces is causing
Internet Service Providers a great deal of issues.
Before 2006 any Catch-up services were mostly P2P (Peer to Peer),
where users would download an application and data would be shared
between the users rather than the service provider giving the now
more commonly used steaming method. Now most service providers have
moved away from the P2P idea and are now using the Streaming
method. This is goodfor the service provider as in the old P2P
system the distribution costs were high and the servers normaly
couldn't handle the large amount of downloading and data
transfer.
Market Competitiors
Access/Usability
Control
Archives
Broadcasting Rights
Profits
Costs
Technologies used for Internet television
The
Hybrid Broadcast Broadband
TV (HbbTV) consortium of industry companies (such as SES Astra
, Humax, Philips, and ANT Software)is currently promoting and
establishing an open European standard (called HbbTV) for hybrid
set-top boxes for the reception of broadcast and broadband digital
TV and multimedia applications with a single user
interface.
Website vs Applications
Stream Quality
Problems
See also
References
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3716781.ecehttp://www.bluestagstudio.co.uk/blog-3-BBCiPlayer_StatsandFactshttp://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302215,00.htm
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