IPTV-Internet Protocol Televisions Key Broadcast Building Blocks

Telcos, in pursuit of the triple play (voice, video, and data), are investing heavily to compete with the cable companies in providing quality video content to the consumer. However, most telco infrastructures do not currently have the bandwidth to support high-quality video distribution. The telcos are updating their Internet protocol (IP) networks and using new encoding schemes such as MPEG4-Part 10 (also called H.264-AVC) to deliver video content to the consumer. This creates a huge opportunity for supplying telcos with updated equipment including the latest encoders and decoders. This paper will investigate the technology that is fueling this new Internet protocol television (IPTV) infrastructure. The first portion will be looking at the video encoding method and the second portion will focus on the video-over-IP network design that is being used for IPTV.