The technology behind Internet TV
Posted on | July 4, 2009 | 1 Comment
Television has become a necessity after food, clothing and shelter. Almost 100% of homes in the developed countries have TV. In the early days we had the TV with antennas, then came Cable TV and now Direct to Home. But now with the emergence of computers and internet you can watch any channel anywhere in the world as long as you have internet connection.
Picture this. Cricket is the national sport of India. Unfortunately, it is not a popular sport worldwide. So the expatriates living abroad, say USA, cannot watch the matches. They will have to shell out big bucks inorder to get their DTH or cable operator to relay cricket matches.
Even the Americans who love their sports viz. Baseball, Football and Basketball are forced to miss the matches as these are not telecasted in other countries. ESPN360 is a leading European online broadcaster specializing in American sports offering subscription and pay-per-view access to Live and On Demand online video coverage of the NHL, NCAA College Basketball, March Madness basketball, and ESPN Shows.
But how does it work?
Internet TV, in short, is video and audio sent over an Internet connection. It’s also known as Internet protocol television, or IPTV. You can watch Internet TV on a computer screen, a television screen (through a set-top box) or a mobile device like on a high end cell phone or an ipod.
You can watch any channel of your interest from any country in the world live or on demand or when it is actually telecasted on cable. There are many free channels. But there is a subscription fee for most popular channels. You can watch shows via Pay-Per-View.
There are two things that make IPTV possible. The first one is bandwidth and the second one is streaming. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred at a time. And about streaming there is an interesting explaination about it in How Stuff Works website
- A server holds video data.
- When you want to watch a video, you click the right command, like “Play” or “Watch.” This sends a message to the server, telling it that you want to watch a certain video.
- The server responds by sending you the necessary data. It uses streaming media protocols to make sure the data arrives in good condition and with all the pieces in the right order.
- A plugin or player on your computer — Windows Media Player and RealPlayer are two popular examples — decodes and plays the video signal.
Few IPTV websites are:
Some Internet TV providers use peer-to-peer file sharing technology and require that you download a specific software client. Instead of receiving video from one central server, the software searches other computers with the same P2P program for a specific file. This same technology is used for applications like BitTorrent.
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September 17th, 2009 @ 8:09 pm
Internet TV is VERY HOT right now. Basically, these companies combine all of the available content and put it on your desktop.