|
Introduction and History
Internet television is also known as Online TV or Internet TV. However it is not to be mistaken as Web television or IPTV. It is a television service which is distributed through the internet. Internet television has become extremely popular by using services such as Hulu and Revision3 in the US, ABC iView and Australia Live TV in Australia, BBC iPlayer, 4oD, Demand Five and ITV Player in the UK.
Internet TV lets users select a program or a TV show that they want to see from an archive of different programs and from the channel directory. There are two forms used to view Internet TV; one is streaming the content directly to the media player or downloading the program on to the viewer's computer. Due to the growth of the TV on-demand market, the TV on-demand sites or the applications have become a must have for all major TV broadcasters. One such major broadcaster, BBC iPlayer brings in visitors that stream more than 1 million videos every week.
One of the BBC's shows "The Apprentice" has taken over 3-5% of internet traffic from England.
The use of on-demand television rises every night at around 10 PM and almost all the providers of this service provide many different formats and efficient quality control so that this service may be viewed on all kinds of devices. Many services offer a HD service along with their SD. Streaming is also the same but gives HD like quality to the device used as long as it has HD capabilities. During peak hours, BBC iPlayer transmits around 12GB of data per second.
Before 2006, almost all Catch-up services used the peer-to-peer networking. In this method the users downloaded the application and data and it would be shared between the users instead of the service provider allowing the use of the modern streaming method. Most service providers have now shifted to using the streaming media instead of P2P. This has been beneficial to the service providers as the distribution costs of P2P systems were quite high and the servers were unable to handle the huge amount of data transfer and downloading.
Access to Internet television
It is a relatively simple process to access Internet television. You can make use of the ISP (Internet service Provider) which is used commonly in many households of the developed countries, for just entering the selected website address. If the user doesn’t have any preference for the streaming service, he can input the name of the chosen TV program in the search engine and follow it up with a catch phrase such as "watch on net" or "online streaming". Accessing TV on the internet has never been simpler. This is because of the good usability of streaming services which have improved quite a bit over the years for maintaining the uncomplicated process. After selecting a program and website, the user might have to wait for a few seconds to allow the selected program to stream. This is a process called buffering which allows the program to run smoothly as opposed to stopping and starting.
Controlling the content:
Controlling the content on the Internet is a major challenge for almost all providers in order to ensure that the user is only allowed to see content which he is permitted to. The providers use methods such as parent control which allow restrictions to be placed on the access to the certified material. One of the common service providers, BBC iPlayer uses a parental control system that gives parents the option to lock the content so you would need a password to access the content. You can also flag the content to warn the user that this content is certified. They may also use the "Honor" system in which the user is directly asked for his date of birth or age in order to verify his eligibility to watch the content.
|
