As an emerging genre of service, Internet Protocol television (IPTV) networks compete with more traditional video service offerings. IPTV networks provide new revenue streams to higher-premium multiplay services, which encompass bundled voice, video, Internet, gaming, and other services.
IPTV offers true integration of information, communications, and entertainment into personalized and interactive applications centered on familiar television-like services, including:
These new opportunities also present challenges to cost-effectively manage the delivery of performance-sensitive services over a service provider’s IP infrastructure. Ensuring quality of service (QoS) for IPTV is essential, especially when the network is also carrying a wide array of other traffic. IPTV and similar latency-sensitive and jitter-sensitive services cannot be delivered at an acceptable quality of service simply through additional bandwidth. IPTV services must provide more efficient resource utilization while offering the best level of experience possible for subscribers.
Figure 1 shows a basic video network topology. The example in this chapter uses this topology. This network topology can be viewed as having two parts: an access side and a metro/core side. The demarcation of these two parts is at the video services router.
Figure 1: Basic Video Network Topology
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