IPTV Avoiding the Obstacles Ahead...

Multiple Pay TV operators are starting to provide video through IPTV infrastructures, and Alticast has published a couple of white papers that discuss the many considerations that need to be made as infrastructures are built out for a full transition to IPTV.

Early entrants like Sling TV can provide good insight to the challenges ahead as pointed out by Fierce Cable's Daniel Frankel in an interview with CEO Roger Lynch:

Lynch restated that the challenge for a live-streaming service like Sling TV is to overcome endemic technical problems associated with using the internet.

"If you were going to architect a network to deliver video, you wouldn't architect the internet the way it was architected," he said. "It wasn't architected for synchronous video delivery. And so a lot of effort goes into designing systems to counteract the way the internet was designed with its random discard of packets and things like that that happen in routers."

Read the rest of the interview to learn how Sling is now in 'Whack-a-Mole' mode to knock out the final issues.