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. . . an article by Christopher Harz, VP of the IPv6 Summit, in the newsletter 6sense, makes a bundle of interesting points:
Strangely, many of the studios and transmission media companies in the US are totally unaware of the advantages they could gain in IPTV with IPv6. This is especially unfortunate because many of these companies are planning to spend billions in upgrading their infrastructures – in IPv4 format, which will then become obsolescent within a foreseeable timeframe. The obvious choice – upgrading to a dual-capable IPv4/IPv6 system – appears to be one of the best-kept secrets in America, at least in the "mahogany row" executive headquarters at US studios and telcos. And:
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of major paranoia for the major studios, who are afraid – with justification – that their video content will be copied in the same way that music is. Various methods of copyright protection are being tried, including allowing the content to be played only on a certain platform, such as a video iPod (for Apple) or on a PC (for Google). IPv6 advocates could score major points with the studios by showing that v6 could support creative new ways of protecting content, such as assuring that video can be delivered to and displayed only on devices with certain approved IPv6 addresses. More broadly:
IPTV can be delivered in two basic ways – realtime (also called "live" or "streaming") or non-realtime (also called "store-and-forward"). Companies such as MediaZone or Fashion TV offer realtime IPTV, and allow you to either pay for content or watch it for free (with associated advertising). Delivery of realtime content over mobile devices such as cell phones is expected to be a major part of the IPTV market. Realtime video can either be scheduled at specific times (like regular TV) or may be made available on demand (VOD). Video on Demand involves unicasting – sending a specified stream to a particular user. This is unfortunately very expensive – a high-quality TV signal can tie up most of a T1 line at the head end, even with the best compression techniques. This is tolerable for individual movies sent on a PPV (Pay Per View) basis, because the movie only lasts a couple of hours, and the PPV price can be adjusted to cover the cost of content and transmission.
Unicasting for regular television viewing – where a TV set may be on literally day and night – can however be prohibitively expensive, especially if the viewer is halfway around the world. It is chiefly because of these high costs that streaming video sent globally over the Internet has been of such low quality – perhaps 80 or 90 lines of resolution with 10fps, as opposed to normal home TV at 30fps and 400+ lines of resolution. An additional problem is lack of QoS – because the existing IPv4 Internet cannot assure end-to-end connectivity and testability (due to NATs and other problems), there is no system-wide way to assure the viewer that he will receive a consistent level of quality, such as he is used to with regular television broadcasts.
The New Internet was designed to fix many of these problems, with QoS to check quality, Flow control to smooth out delivery and multicasting to greatly reduce costs, especially for scheduled (as opposed to VOD) content. It is rumored that the Olympics in China will be one of the first major events to be netcast in IPv6. His bottom line:
It appears that in the US, content sent over the Internet will initially consist of repeats of branded shows, as well as short-form niche entertainment including comedy clips, sports, poker, music videos and weather. This will be followed by normal television shows being netcast via closed networks by telcos (with triple play packages) as well as other major distributors. Independent and longer-form TV shows and films for the global market will get a boost when IPv6 service as well as WLAN-enabled cell phones become widely available. This could facilitate a new age of opportunity for independent producers of creative content, who may be able to bypass today's major studios in distributing films to a global audience. Such producers will need a new generation of Internet search engines (and lots of promotion), to get their products recognized by a widely dispersed public looking at an ocean of new video content.
posted by James DeLong @ 10:32 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...
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