Seminar Overview of IPTV systems

1. SeminarOverview of IPTV systems October 2009 Ernst Nordström ernstn@bizopt.se

2. Switch from analog TV to digital TV • Countries in europe will switch from analog TV to digital TV by 2012 • Competition between traditional DTV operators (cable, satellite, terrestrial) and IPTV operators • From a customer point of view, the meaningful differences between alternative DTV offerings are functionality, quality and price

3. History of IPTV • Packet-oriented communication first proposed by Paul Baran, Rand Corporation, US in 1962 • Statistical multiplexing of video proposed by Haskell at Bell Laborarories, US in 1972 for a picturephone application • First IPTV service in Europe introduced in Italy by FastWeb in 2001 • France Telecom and Telefonica introduced IPTV services in 2003

4. IPTV in parallel with Internet TV • IPTV is called managed TV since capacity is reserved for video transmissions • Internet TV is called unmanaged TV since capacity is not reserved for video transmissions • Today telcos tend to offer IPTV and Internet TV in parallel

5. Worldwide IPTV subscribers • Today (2009), there are almost 600 commercial IPTV launces worldwide • Worldwide IPTV subscriber base will reach 19.6 M in 2008 • Western Europe will reach 8.2 M subscribers in 2008 and grow to 18.8 M in 2012 • Asia-Pacific will reach 6.5 M subscribers in 2008 and grow to 8.7 M in 2012 • 1.1% of households worldwide will be IPTV subscribers in 2008 • 2.8% of households worldwide will be IPTV subscribers in 2012 • Some analysts believe it will take several years before the customer base for IPTV will become significant (2013: 90 million; 2016: 300 million). Source: Gartner

6. Market share of IPTV in the Swedish DTV market • The Swedish DTV market is divided between different operator segments: cable operators (23%), satellite operators (35%), terrestrial operators (33%), and IPTV operators (9%). • The company IDC predicts the market share of IPTV in Sweden will increase to 26% by 2011. • Dominant digital IPTV operators in Sweden: TeliaSonera, Bredbandbolaget/Viasat, CanalDigital, and FastTV.

7. Top 10 IPTV operators in 2008 • Iliad (Free) - France • France Telecom (Orange) - France • PCCW - Hong Kong • Nuef Cegetel - France • Telefonica - Spain • Chunghwa Telecom - Taiwan • China Telecom - China • Belgacom - Belgium • TeliaSonera - Sweden • Fastweb - Italy

8. IPTV players • Equipment providers • Solution integrators • Network providers • Service providers • Content providers

9. IPTV operators • Incumbent telecoms (telco) operator • Incumbent owns network infrastructure • Alternative network operator (ANO) • Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), or • Local loop unbundling (LLU) rented from incumbent operator

10. Sections of an IPTV system • Head endis central or regional site that transmits video information stored on VoD and broadcast servers. • Home end comprises the modem and reception equipment including PCs and set top boxes (STBs) where content is displayed. • Aggregation and transport network consists of all the communication equipment to link the home and head ends.

11. IPTV architecture

12. Software components of an IPTV system • Application and content platform • Middleware • Resource and admission control function

13. Hardware components of an IPTV system • Home network • residential gateway • set top box • IPTV service network • security and monitoring • IPTV HW platform • IPTV SW platform • Access network • optical network • access network • IP & Ethernet aggregation • data centre network

14. IPTV video encoding and transmission • Date centers in existing IPTV networks encode video information by MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC • Encoded video is transmitted using a CBR or capped VBR model • CBR model gives constant bit rate at the price of variable quality • VBR model gives constant quality at the price of variable bit rate

15. Categories of IPTV video transfers • Stored video • Often requested video contents for BTV and VoD can be transferred in advance from VHE to VHOs based on channel and program popularity scores • Rarely requested video contents for BTV and VoD should not be prefetched and must be transferred on an on-demand basis • Live video • Live video for BTV must be transmitted in real time can not be prefetched and must be transferred on an on-demand basis

16. IP router • Packet routers in IPTV networks consist of a switch core and multiple input and output controllers • Queueing of packets is possible at the input/output controllers • Input controllers have queues to store packets waiting for switching to an output link • Output controllers have queues to store packets waiting to be scheduled for transmission

17. Performance measures • Quality of Service (QoS) • Information transport performance • Packet loss, delay, delay variability • Grade of Service (GoS) • Network availability • Call blocking probability, call set-up delay • Quality of Experience (QoE) • Describes users satisfaction of all imperfections affecting the service • Video quality, channel change time, blocking probability for VoD requests

18. Traffic engineering in IPTV networks • IPTV networks are most likely to operate under packet scale congestion • Markov traffic models are sufficient for IPTV networks • Traffic smoothing or shaping is recommended and will improve the statistical multiplexing gain   • Simple metods like Chernoff bound could be used by CAC in IPTV networks