Content Awareness Remains Key
Session and content awareness plays an important role in this IPTV environment. Francois Modarresse, vice president in charge of product management at Skystream Networks Inc., describes content awareness as essential for multimedia IP over satellite, as voice, video and data transmissions require uninterrupted and jitter-free connections. "While voice and live video may be more tolerant to transmission loss, IPTV requires a jitter-free transmission, as service providers must communicate with subscribers to find the appropriate titles that they wish to view," says Modarresse. "Session awareness is necessary for interactive services such as broadband Internet. When a user requests information via data downloads, a service provider must be able to instantly initiate a session."
Skystream, which was acquired by Tandberg in February, offers a source media router that transmits data in DVB-S/S2 streams. While the encapsulator's quality-of-service features help service providers deliver low-jitter transmissions for voice over Internet Protocol via satellite and support inherent content flow-control, the source media router also offers a scrambling function for IPTV that integrates with a conditional access system that controls encryption.
Skystream's Mediaplex and iPlex headends promote content and session awareness through subscriber automation, tracking each subscriber's content requests.
"Session awareness is very important in IPTV," says Basile. "The IPTV environment is a session-based delivery mechanism. Subscribers constantly set up and tear down sessions. In opposition to a traditional broadcast environment where the network does not have to be aware of the session, the IPTV headend needs to dynamically switch/route the right content to the right subscriber in real time. Scopus provides the ability to switch and process video in real time and support the necessary IP protocols such as Internet Group Management Protocol, allowing users to pull/push video from/to an IP network," he says.
The session awareness role also makes IPTV a compelling propositions for the provisioning of TV services a la carte. "If the viewer pays for a 30-channel package on IPTV, session or content awareness allows the consumer to view the 30 channels that he or she wants and not the 30 or 120 channels that he or she gets out of a typical cable TV or [direct-to-home] package," says del Rosario.
Compression breakthroughs and the fact that content may arrive at the headend from multiple sources or networks only adds another layer of complexity to the process at hand. "We know how to get the maximum picture quality out of a signal, which is especially important as we compress channels to dramatically lower bit rates," says Feldman. "The native signals are arriving in any number of standards and qualities, and they are coming from disparate networks, including IP, fiber, satellite and terrestrial. Expertise at the point of ingest, aggregation and multiplex is critical to the telco delivering a quality signal."
BTV Benefits
Enterprise customers may want to take a close look at IPTV. The Business TV (BTV) sector may find that while private VSAT networks offer distinct advantages, there are IPTV options available as well. IPTV-enabled infrastructure can accommodate BTV, and there are distinct advantages in doing this, says del Rosario, who emphasizes that enterprises that conduct BTV on an occasional use basis in particular might find that IPTV is a more cost-effective way to deliver content.
"The advantage is that it is probably cheaper to deliver content using IPTV compared to traditional means, since a transponder rental or lease that goes on quarter-hour rates may be expensive. This is, of course, unless a whole transponder is leased for the purposes of BTV only, which means that an enterprise utilizes BTV at very high levels," says del Rosario. "This may not be the case in many instances, however."
While the model discussed is driven by the presence of BTV in advance of any IPTV transport, there is an opposing model whereby IPTV is used to easily implement a BTV solution. "IPTV is an effective way to implement BTV," says Martijn Lopes Cardozo, executive vice president, distribution & partnerships at Goldpocket. "This is especially true if all the users are already on a high-speed WAN or LAN network. This is a function of the existing billing relationship the IPTV operator may have with the customer. While IPTV itself does not present business model challenges, growing a highly capital expenditure intensive business as the third or fourth entrant has its challenges. These include content acquisition, advertising and operating scale. The most sophisticated entrants have long term goals as overcoming these challenges will require focus and time."
Because so many BTV channels are IP-based, using the same technology used for IPTV, this can open the door to some innovative collaboration. "Because IPTV systems are encrypted, it is feasible for a corporation to strike a deal with a telco to extend the reach of their training network to end users at home, if they are passed by the telcos' IPTV franchise. It is a question of aggregating and encrypting the BTV feed at the headend," says Feldman.
According to Bontrager, IPTV can be implemented for BTV purposes for enterprise-wide training seminars, remote employee meetings and president's messages, among other uses. "The advantages are the ability to encode the content at a low bit rate and deliver the content through a traditional [virtual private network]. The cost of the systems are not inexpensive, but the bandwidth savings and video quality should compensate for the cost," he says.
Basile stresses that for BTV purposes, IP delivery allows a unified delivery of multiple services beyond traditional video services. "IP allows the delivery of services to business using a single, dynamic network infrastructure," he says.
IPTV Over Satellite Works But Challenges Remain
Satellite faces a few big challenges as the IPTV race gets underway, such as the lack of an ubiquitous, two-way network. "We have certainly seen some examples of what I would call basic rich media and interactivity in satellite services like BSkyB, but the lack of a fast, always-on back channel limits what is possible," says Graczyk.
Other aspects of satellite network operations need to be adjusted or upgraded in order to accommodate or more efficiently handle IPTV. According to Feldman, a new skill set is needed so engineers and operations personnel can evolve and better understand IPbased applications. "The result is a new dynamic where traditional video operations staffs must learn to team with IT operations staffs; a mixing of very different disciplines who were previously wary of each other," he says. "Satellite versus fiber is not what forces the adjustment. It is operating in an IP-IPTV environment that pushes the envelope of convergence, the delivery of traditional video content in a data world of ones and zeros," he says. "Everything from encapsulation of signals into an IP-transport stream or a multi-protocol transport stream to the ability to remotely manage the nodes on a network from a central location, transitions the transmission support from a technical operations center environment to a data-oriented network operations center environment."
To effectively and efficiently handle the growth of IPTV, satellite service providers must deal with transmission, target customers and service differentiation methods, says Modarresse. Besides embracing DVB-S2 and MPEG4/AVC to save bandwidth, while maintaining superior picture quality, satellite service providers that deliver content to regional wired or wireless operators must customize their programming line-up for local customers. "These operators rely on edge solutions to multiplex, encode and transcode content that create a personalized program lineup," he says. "When it comes to service differentiation, IPTV opens satellite service providers to next-generation services, including push [video on demand], an alternative to network [video on demand]. This involves prepositioning content in subscribers' set-top boxes and eliminating denial-of-service messages associated with peak-time cable [video on demand] requests."
IPTV is not only coming on fast but also is arriving at a time when the customer knows that he or she can exercise absolute control over the content. Some officials say the key to capitalizing is to roll out set-top boxes with digital video recorders bundled with IPTV offerings as fast as possible.
IPTV is turning heads, and where there are eyeballs, money is sure to follow.
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