IPTV Delivery Networks

Chapter 11Towards Multi-Operator IPTV Services Over 5G Networks

Gergely Biczók, Manos Dramitinos, Håkon Lønsethagen, Luis M. Contreras, George D. Stamoulis and Laszlo Toka

11.1 Introduction

Television service has been continuously evolving in terms of different perspectives, evolving from analogue signal transmission to digital video processing, being distributed by the air-broadcast stations to fibre-based infrastructure, or, more recently, adapting to the need for content delivery on large plasma screens as well as small tablet displays. The fundamental TV service provisioning model has, for many decades, been a one-to-many communication model. Content is shared to multiple users, each of whom actively decides what to watch. TV has also evolved from being the principal entertainment service to yet another service among multiple entertainment sources such as gaming, video on demand (VoD) and Web browsing, due to the proliferation of the latter.

Telecom operators have realised this and have created service bundles by aggregating content offerings, including TV programmes. Such aggregations of services are provided more efficiently over a common service delivery framework enabled by Internet Protocol (IP); multimedia standards for both file transport and stream delivery rely on IP. This way, the IPTV service has emerged. Simultaneously, there is a shift towards a TV service based on the Web-based delivery of video content by means of the ubiquitous Hypertext Transfer Protocol ...