Internet television

From ArticleWorld

Internet television emerged as a natural extension of traditional television and it uses the Internet to transmit broadcasts by using streaming technologies. The moment seems ripe for such a development as the Internet amount of users reaches a critical number, the bandwidth available is on a continuous rise and the streaming technologies themselves already seem to reach a maturity level.

Description

Typically nowadays all broadcasts are made using low quality streams with the use of stream related technologies such as Real Player. Other software is also used for streaming, but they also tend to be of low quality mainly to preserve bandwidth. The most common problem encountered by television web servers nowadays is the overload. Oddly enough there haven’t been yet any legal problems relating to this particular application, probably because they are so scarcely met on the web and the prohibitive cost for setting such a server. Peer to peer television also seems to be on the rise with multiple ongoing projects at the moment, this could very well signal the end of pioneer era for this industry as it is very likely that internet television will be targeted for pirating. A constant effort is also made in the direction of making pay per view channels available on the web while retaining the traditional economic model.

Types of internet television

The broadcasts that are made through the internet can be separated into four different categories:

• There are TV channels that broadcast only on the internet. There are few of these at the moment and they are considered the real pioneers in the field. An example would be web62.com.
• There are the simulcasts made by the traditional TV stations which mirror exactly the broadcast made through the classic system.
• Some traditional TV stations prefer to make certain content available through the internet. This trend mostly affects news stations such as BBC.
• For more aggressive TV stations that want a bigger share of this emerging market there is the alternative of realizing extra content exclusively for the web.