The way TV content is delivered has changed. Older cable boxes and satellite dishes are being replaced by on-line systems that deliver video to any screen that has an Internet connection. IPTV, Internet Protocol Television, is the technology that is driving this transition and knowledge about this technology can help consumers, developers, and content providers make informed decisions.
IPTV is different from traditional broadcast TV that broadcasts the same signal, because it delivers content on-demand through a managed network. The server responds to the viewer’s request for a stream and the data packets flow through an IP network. That’s a fundamental difference and it’s everything from how channels are distributed to how quality is controlled.
The three core streaming protocols that drive IPTV
All IPTV systems are not created equal under the hood. Video data is packaged, transmitted and received using several different protocols. All have their own trade-offs for latency, reliability and compatibility.
HLS is the acronym for HTTP Live Streaming
HLS was developed by Apple and is one of the most popular streaming protocols on the web. It transmits video streams segmentized into short segments (usually between two and ten seconds) and delivers these sequentially, over standard HTTP connections. Since HLS is HTTP-based, it easily traverses firewalls and can be played on almost any modern device with no extra configuration.
HLS is supported, allowing the player to adapt to the bandwidth available, with a higher video quality as bandwidth increases. The lower the bandwidth of your connection, the lower the bitrate of the stream you get, and the higher the bandwidth, the higher the bitrate stream you get. This flexibility has led to the adoption of HLS as the go-to approach for most consumer-facing IPTV platforms that are available in today’s market.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)
HLS has an open-standard counterpart, called MPEG-DASH. While HLS was exclusive to Apple, DASH was created by Moving Picture Experts Group as a codec neutral, vendor independent solution. Both protocols can perform adaptive bitrate delivery in the similar manner, however DASH is more flexible in terms of supporting codecs, it is supported without any restriction by H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1 and other codecs.
DASH is also favored by large-scale platforms and broadcasters for its interoperability with a variety of devices and ecosystems. It’s the backbone of the many smart TV applications and enterprise IPTV deployments where standardization across a wide range of different hardware solutions is critical.
RTMP is a real-time messaging protocol
RTMP was originally created by Macromedia, and then acquired by Adobe, and was designed to deliver audio and video over persistent TCP connections with low latency. It was the go-to protocol for live streaming ingest (sending a live feed from an encoder to a streaming server) and continues to be a popular choice for doing so.
Most modern devices don’t support playback of RTMP, as most browsers no longer support it due to the death of Flash. As an ingest protocol, however, it is very much a part of the broadcast infrastructure. When broadcasting to a media server with a streaming software such as OBS Studio, or most hardware encoders for that matter, they will default to RTMP.
Providing a secure and reliable transport solution
SRT is a newer open-source protocol from Haivision (and maintained by the SRT Alliance). It was created with the sole purpose of addressing the challenge of live video streaming providing high quality over an unreliable public internet. SRT is much more reliable in actual network environments than RTMP, since it implements forward error correction and automatic retransmission.
Broadcasters who are broadcasting live over continents such as news feeds, sports production, remote interviews, etc., have embraced SRT quickly because it ensures broadcast-quality video even in the face of network changes. It’s neither as simple as RTMP nor as complex as satellite contribution links.
How IPTV Delivery Architecture Works
IPTV is more than just a protocol. It depends upon a coordinated stack of components that are working together.
Content is then compressed and encoded by codecs (e.g. H.264 or H.265) at the source. Because of compression, file sizes are significantly smaller and don’t affect the quality that is visible to the user, which makes it economically viable to stream large-scale files. The encoded stream is then packaged (encoded into the segment format that the delivery protocol needs) and pushed to an origin server.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides the stream from the origin to edge servers that are located geographically near end users. This helps minimize latency and eliminate any single server from becoming a choke point in traffic during times of peak usage. Both viewers are subscribed to the same stream and both of them will get it from a local edge node instead of a remote origin server.
On the client side, a media player receives segment requests, buffers incoming data and outputs video to the screen. Today’s players, whether embedded in a smart TV app or set-top boxes, or accessed via a browser, deal with protocol negotiation, adaptive bitrate switching and Digital Rights Management (DRM) decryption without any problems.
So what is the bandwidth equation for Multicast vs. Unicast?
IPTV systems have either of two delivery modes. The Unicast approach involves streaming one stream to each one of the individuals consuming the content, thus performing well with on-demand content, but being bandwidth-hungry as the number of viewers increases. Multicast delivers the same stream to multiple subscribers at the same time, saving server bandwidth and network bandwidth for live channels that have a lot of viewers watching at the same time.
The term managed IPTV networks is used for networks that are normally operated by telecoms and ISPs, and use multicast to deliver live TV within their controlled infrastructure. Over-the-top services across the open internet are mainly unicast-based as multicast requires support at the network level; not all networks provide this.
The landscape is maturing for the Protocol
IPTV technology has gone from an experiment to a necessity in just 10 years. HLS and DASH are the primary formats for consumers’ playback. Live contribution is available for both RTMP and SRT. CDNs are super-absorbent. Combined, these protocols are the technical bedrock of today’s television services: reliably, adaptively and globally.
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