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.

QoS the key to IPTV shift

No matter how many dropped calls, bad connections or dead zones, there’s no denying that mobile telephony has eroded use of landlines over the past several decades.  In a new white paper from Alticast, Susan Crouse posits that a similar shift is priming the pump for a parallel shift in the television landscape.

 “IPTV Migration Strategies, Part II: The Household Infrastructure” looks at the in-home obstacles – including Wi-Fi inconsistencies, shared bandwidth and other problems – that operators need to overcome, and identifies Quality of Service (QoS) as the “lynchpin” in determining operators’ readiness to shift to IPTV.

The paper notes that younger viewers already are accepting video breakup, buffering and Adaptive Bitrate quality degradation in the name of any-device, anytime convenience, just as mobile callers have learned to put up with the inconsistencies of cell service. But that doesn’t mean Cable operators will accept degraded video quality, so while bandwidth is getting better and streaming is improving, operators are figuring out how they will deliver high quality video over an IPTV network as they transform their video delivery platform.

Ultimately, IPTV services can offer greater viewing flexibility, tools that allow consumers greater control over the viewing environment and “big data”-driven search and discovery and other new applications. Solving QoS issues can unlock the door to product and service innovations that can enable significant customer acquisition, customer retention and new product offerings expanding revenue opportunities for cable operators.

To download the white paper, follow this link.