Introduction to IPTV

IPTV is not a new development– it has been around at least since the end of the 1990s, but, the eligibility in the broadband technologies helps to improve IPTV technologies rapidly. Nowadays, Interactivity is taking place in our daily lives; the users have a chance to change things happening in the story as the program progresses, works when you rely on the participants. As in a computer game, the actions of the user can change what happens on the screen. After the 1990’s computer games attached people to interactivity, so that current generation is keen on doing all of their tasks on their multimedia devices, the very first thing is music, rather than listening their music over their audio systems, they have started to listen their playlists over their computers. The most important thing is the change of the industry, because they have targeted their developments according to this need. For instance many of the record companies have established internet ventures, where the users can play their favourite songs over those web sites, this is the first step of streaming content over IP. Now, the second phase of the change will be on video broadcasting architecture, with the launch of the video streaming websites such as youtube.com, revver.com and many others, users started to watch videos over those web streamers. As the reports showing that %57 of the LOST episodes has been watched over internet, and this is an obvious sign that, now they are demanding to watch their favourite programs over internet. There are a lot of experiments with different ways of broadcasting architectures, but it is obvious that “IP” will take a part when the broadcasting architecture is going to change.

On the user side, the main reason to choose the IPTV is to get a more convenient and enhanced television programming to be entertained in a richer way, and have a chance to three important things (phone, internet, television) in one package. Additional to that, they have a chance to watch huge amounts of content, when you compare the content with the current ability of broadcasting; IPTV content will be sky rocketed. Moreover, they can watch all of those contents whenever they want. Nowadays, everybody has a pay TV contract all around the world, for instance, in Turkey we have two major Pay TV service providers and people are not happy about them at all. The billing methods of this kind of usage more or less are the same, however, IPTV will provide different kinds of billing opportunities such as prepaid programming, membership payment. On the broadcaster side, they will spend a lot of money to change their current systems to IPTV broadcasting system; additional to that, they would have extra rivals due to easy broadcast opportunities of IPTV. When it comes to measurements, the protocol numbers give identification to the users, so that IPTV has a big advantage on measuring the user’s behaviours and this will directly affect the advertising revenues. Productions will cost lower than before and different kind of productions will show up, the most important different production will be interactive programming. For instance, it will be better than current measurement tools. It is obvious that the interactivity between the viewer and service provider will enhance the content. However, there should be some adjustments about the program scheduling, due to the intensive content, the program length should be shorter than the traditional TV models, on the other hand, and advertising methods will be changed due to efficient measurement techniques, rather than delivering the advertising to broad audience, advertisers will choose to deliver their products to interested group to increase their revenues. IPTV is the combination of three industry telecoms, media and IT, and this will affect the world’s entertainment style.