Chapter 1IPTV: Delivering TV Services over IP Networks
Suliman Mohamed Fati and Putra Sumari
1.1 Overview
When we watch television, it is not possible to ignore the vast change that television service has undergone over time. In fact, television services have been experiencing several developments since the invention of the television. The first analogue colour television broadcast was started in 1951 via terrestrial broadcast with only a single channel (Fink, 1951; Baker, 1984). Then, another television service was delivered via cable (Dees et al., 2007). After that, digital TV emerged with the benefits of digital signal transmission and digital compression techniques. These benefits let TV service providers broadcast a variety of channels with high quality within a limited bandwidth (Joshi and Maskara, 2012; Picard and Siciliani, 2013). Furthermore, digital TV bridged the gap between the TV industry and computing industry as a result of the digital transmission of signals. More recently, Internet TV, also called online TV, has been delivering TV services over the public Internet without any commitment on the part of Internet service providers. The user must surf the website of the TV service provider and enjoy watching live and on-demand TV content (Simpson, 2013). YouTube is the dominant Internet TV provider, with 85% of the Internet TV consumption in the USA (Lee et al., 2013).
With the prosperous evolution of digital video formats and broadcasting as well as the advent ...
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