Trapped in "IPTV Land"
Colin Dixon, Practice Manager, IP Media
September 14, 2007
Up until the very last pre-show panel session at IBC, I felt trapped in "IPTV-land." Speaker after speaker lambasted the open Internet as a medium "not fit for quality video streaming" and argued that only new TelcoTV networks had sufficient QoS (Quality of Service) and QoE (that oh-so-ephemeral Quality of Experience) to get the job done. Online video services such as Joost and Babelgum were dismissed as "needing work" and the consensus seemed to be that the only quality broadband video experience required a download and a hard disk.
Yet my experience with Internet video streaming has been quite different of late. To be sure, there are some sites which struggle to deliver a satisfying experience even at the best of the times. Others are quietly going about the job of delivering solid television quality video consistently on any network with decent bandwidth.
I have previously written about the super job Move Networks is doing for their clients. As well, I have personally viewed many of last season's 24 episodes from the comfort of hotel rooms, lobbies, or my home office by simply pointing my browser at the Fox site on MySpace (don't try this if you're outside the 50 states). And many of the Flash video sites, utilizing the On2 codec, also do a super job in adverse conditions.
Before one of the sessions, the moderator (Stephen Lowe) asked one of the panelists to use his browser and go to one of the BBCs streaming video sites - then and there. And guess what? It worked. Over the show's wireless LAN (which I can tell you performed hideously for browsing and email), the player showed at least VHS-quality video and switched streams pretty effectively as well.
Now I'm not claiming that the Internet is ready for prime-time (and in this case I mean that literally). Clearly it is not. The BBC, for example, recently stated that the largest number of concurrent streams it has ever supported was 189,000, but this is a trickle compared to the number of viewers who watch a popular show in prime time (for example, Nielsen said The Closer on TNT pulled in nearly 8-million viewers last week).
What is clear, however, is that the technology exists today to deliver a very satisfying video experience to many thousands of viewers. And no doubt this technology will continue to improve. For example, one of the biggest problems with scaling streamed Internet video is that every stream is point-to-point (that is, the stream goes from one server to one viewer). Investigations are already underway into how the Internet can be upgraded to support point-to-multipoint (that is, a single stream goes from one server to many viewers), a move that makes a huge difference in the ability of the Internet to scale to large-scale capacity.
One thing is certain: the immediacy of Internet streaming coupled with the "I want it now" generation guarantees that there will be plenty of people working on the Internet infrastructure until it is, quite literally, ready for prime-time.
This is one of Colin Dixon's Opinions on his recent IBC 2007 trip. View his other Opinions:
IBC-2:Of Guides, Graphics and Quality
IBC-3:A Few Afterthoughts and Reflections
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