Increasing the user perceived quality for IPTV services

Currently, digital television is gradually replacing analogue TV. Although these digital TV services can be delivered via various broadcast networks (e.g., terrestrial, cable, satellite), Internet Protocol TV over broadband telecommunication networks offers much more than traditional broadcast TV. Not only can it improve the quality that users experience with this linear programming TV service, but it also paves the way for new TV services, such as video-on- demand, time-shifted TV, and network personal video recorder services, because of its integral return channel and the ability to address individual users. This article first provides an overview of a typical IPTV network architecture and some basic video coding concepts. Based on these, we then explain how IPTV can increase the linear programming TV quality experienced by end users by reducing channel-change latency and mitigating packet loss. For the latter, forward error correction and automatic repeat request techniques are discussed, whereas for the former a solution based on a circular buffer strategy is described. This article further argues that the availability of larger buffers in the network enables IPTV to better offer new services (in particular, time-shifted TV, network personal video recorder, and video-on-demand) than the competing platforms.