TV broadcasting has come a long way. From over the air broadcasting to Community Antenna Television (CATV) to satellite dish, to internet broadcasting to TV on mobile phones (at least in Japan). It has been a mixed bag, both in terms of technical successes as well as business plans. This has been simple transmission so far, what it lacks is intelligence; search capabilities, billing, dynamic programming, interactivity, integration of other services and other VAF (Value Added Features) to make it attractive to the end user, in this case the viewer or the subscriber.

The first regularly scheduled television service in the United States began in 1928. BBC begins regular TV transmissions as far back as 1930. The 1st "experimental" coaxial cable lines were laid by AT&T between New York and Philadelphia in 1936. In 1946 came color TV and in 1948, Cable television is introduced in Pennsylvania as a means of bringing television to rural areas. One million homes in the United States have television sets by then. 1956 gave us the first remote control. In 1962, AT&T launches Telstar, the first satellite to carry TV broadcasts - broadcasts are now internationally relayed. On 20th July 1969, first TV transmission from the moon is transmitted and 600 million people watched it. In 1973, Giant screen projection TV is first marketed. In 1981, NHK demonstrates HDTV with 1,125 lines of resolution. 1996 gave us WebTV. In 1997, Microsoft bought the WebTV network for $425 million dollars and have trademarked the name. Today, webtv is an add-on device that compliments a regular television, usually a box that provides the internet connection and conversion of web pages for viewing on your own television screen with an added special remote control and keyboard so that you can surf.

PRESENT:

Due to the bandwidth requirements of video, IPTV requires
broadband connections to be distributed. It can also be distributed over Ethernet to the home networks and covers both live TV (multicasting) as well as stored video (Video on Demand VOD). The playback of IPTV requires either a personal computer or a "set-top box" connected to a TV. The primary underlying protocols used for IPTV are IGMP version 2 for channel change signaling for live TV and RTSP for Video on Demand. Protocols using peer-to-peer technology to distribute live TV are just starting to emerge. Their primary advantage over traditional distribution models is that they provide a way of sharing data delivery workloads across connected client systems as well as over the distributor's own server infrastructure, which drastically decreases the operational costs for a stream provider. Video Compression formats used for IPTV include MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, WMV (Windows Media Video 9 and VC1), XviD, DivX, and Ogg Theora.

A household with 300 cable or satellite channels has access to 7,000 hours of programming a day, almost 3 million per year. That's a lot, but it's only a fraction of the 31 million hours of total annual programming. Every major cable company is making investments to allow TV to be distributed over the Internet, giving you access to each one of those 31 million hours. And then there's this year's 36-fold explosion in consumer-generated video on the Internet. From mobile phones to big screens, its video everywhere. This onslaught is changing the rules of the game. More music videos are being watched on AOL than on MTV. Procter & Gamble is cutting down on pricey 30-second TV spots to beef up the online presence of its packaged goods. For its part, Yahoo! is working with SBC and Microsoft on an IPTV/fiber-to-the-curb initiative called Project Lightspeed that uses Yahoo! software to deliver video-on-demand, instant messaging, photo collections, and music. Watching whatever you want (or didn't even know you wanted) wherever you are whenever you feel like it has been a fantasy since the early days of the Internet. Now it's a reality

FUTURE:

In the past, plenty of technologies have been hyped as the next must-have product; will IPTV be a true winner and change the way we watch TV forever? The two most popular communications devices which have stood the test of time in the world have been TV and Radio; imagine web-izing them and giving them to the international community just like email and instant messaging. 32 million subscribers will be watching TV provided by telecommunications providers in 2009, up from 1.6 million at the end of 2004. Get ready for a million-channel universe but guess what it will NOT be free like over the air channels. Just imagine receiving a message on your cell phone saying that your favorite show will be aired in just a few hours. Realizing that you will be in a meeting and will miss it, you use your cell phone to program your digital video recorder to record the show. Imagine that you are watching your favorite show when the phone rings, displaying the caller ID of your friend, on the TV screen and you use your television remote control to answer the call. Imagine that you want to learn about E-commerce and remember seeing this topic covered on an online education show and, after checking your service provider's archives, you select that episode for on-demand viewing.

A billion hours of programming is meaningless without an efficient way to search it. Computers are still a long way from watching and understanding TV. They will need artificial intelligence to locate the exact program that a viewer desires. Will google and yahoo give us 'virtually' unlimited spaces to store our videos? Will we watch all over videos on our mobile phones? Will consumers buy all their services from one provider? Sure, you get one bill, but one provider means no competition, meaning that the one “Triple Play” provider can easily get fat, dumb and lazy. The TV viewing experience will be totally reinvented. It will be any program, anywhere, anytime. One day we will tell our children that there used to be a one-eyed baby-sitter also called the 'idiot box' and sometimes it came with 'rabbit ears', just like our parents tell us today that 'once upon a time, TV transmission used to be black and white and you actually had to get up to change a channel because there was no remote. When will PTCL offer PTV in the form of IPTV after getting permission from PTA and PEMRA? - I always wanted to say that : )

The writer is a BSc. (EE)& MBA from USA. Some of his certifications include MCSE, CCNA, NGDLC, ATM and NGN among others. He has worked in Telecommunications, and taught in various universities. Currently he is working as an Telecom/IT Consultant in UAE and running an online newsletter.
He can be reached at info@farooq.com.pk