IPTV delivery: technology hot spots

Content

• Opportunities and risks
• Challenge is to touch massive content in real time
• Next step: support for new services and unicast traffic explosion
  • Functionality

    "hot spots"

    and scalability are priorities
  • Segments by critical hardware function
• HD drives signal-processing needs for IPTV
  • Rise of MPEG-4 encoding at source
  • Constant-bit-rate IPTV requires transcoding
  • MPEG-4 encoding still improving
  • Requirement for HD over MPEG-4 will be dictated by picture quality, not bandwidth
  • The nature of IP and algorithmic tricks beyond encoding complicate the bandwidth calculation
• Impact of VoD and

  "near PVR"

  on encoding and video server throughput and storage
  • Bigger on-demand libraries and time-shifting options raise storage and processing demands
  • Encoding implementations move towards more programmable chips
• Packet processing for IPTV
  • Inspecting and manipulating packets for video delivery
  • Packet processing looks to address intelligent ad insertion
  • Vendors all claim to be winners in race to 10 GbE switching and packet processing
  • Competition at the packet-processing chip level is also fierce
  • IPTV video servers
• Competitive strategies
• Technology vendor descriptions
• The bottom line
• IPTV rollout creates wide-ranging component demand
• Table of figures
  • Figure 1 High-level view of the IPTV delivery chain
  • Table 1 Functionality hot spots for live broadcast, time-shift, and on-demand IPTV
  • Figure 2 Generic IPTV delivery network (with Microsoft servers) showing technology hot spots in payload path
  • Table 2 IPTV encoder vendor strategies and target customer base
  • Table 3 IPTV transcoder/ad insertion vendor strategies and target customer base
  • Table 4 IPTV broadcast and VoD server vendor strategies and target customer base