What is IPTV?

Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, refers to television that is distributed over an IP network—the same kind of network people use to surf the internet and exchange emails.

In reality, IPTV technology enables an organisation’s IP network to carry much more than just television. With IPTV, you can easily distribute terrestrial and satellite television and radio, videos/DVDs, digital videos on-demand (VoDs), digital signage, information boards, and web content throughout your facility.  All of this multimedia content can be viewed on standard and high definition TVs and various kinds of AV display equipment, as well as PCs on every desktop.

The Four Faces of IPTV

Anyone who has watched videos on YouTube.com or a TV programme over the internet is already familiar with some form of IPTV. However, this has very little to do with how organisations use IPTV, although the base technology is much the same.

In reality, there are four basic kinds of IPTV, three of which are oriented to consumer needs and not suitable for organisational use.

• Internet IPTV (consumer)
• Telco IPTV (consumer)
• Broadcast IPTV (consumer)
• Local or Building IPTV (organisational)

The major difference is that consumer-oriented IPTV is delivered via the internet, which organisations wish to avoid for reasons of quality, access control, and bandwidth cost.

Local IPTV, also known as Building IPTV, is designed to distribute television and video across building and campus networks over a local area network (LAN). The content is injected directly into the building LAN rather than through the organisation’s internet firewall. For organisations, this has three fundamental advantages over consumer-oriented forms of IPTV:

• It leverages the comparatively limitless bandwidth of organisational LANs to deliver much higher quality to many more users.
• It allows much more stringent access control—not just by channel, but by business unit, department, group, or even individual user.
• It does not consume any internet bandwidth, which is far more costly than LAN bandwidth.

 Learn more about Building IPTV by downloading our white paper, An Introduction to Building IPTV.