Jeremy Visser

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about IPTV lately. It’s something that is exciting, useful, and inevitable.

As I understand it, IPTV is defined to be a live television service delivered over multicast (usually RTP) over a broadband Internet connection. Multicast has an advantage over normal traffic (“unicast”) because it avoids the duplication of traffic. Only one copy of the data is ever sent.

TPG currently offer 19 channels over an IPTV service, and TransACT allegedly offer over 50. iiNet is “on the brink of IPTV launch”. There are rumours that Internode are investigating something similar too.

That last paragraph should have triggered alarm bells in your head. It did for me, but maybe I’m just a cynic. Let me explain.

I asked myself: why are the ISPs providing the IPTV service? It sounds wrong to me. I’ve tried to come up with an answer, and my conclusion is that it is because of two reasons: (1) infrastructure (multicast is virtually non-existant in most production networks) and (2) content lock-in.

Having the ISPs provide the infrastructure for the IPTV service (marketing, encoding, distribution, etc.) means the ISP will likely sign a contract to exclusive usage rights with the TV partner for each channel they will provide. If iiNet sign an exclusive deal with Sky News, they sure as heck ain’t going to let Internode or TPG also put the content on their networks.

The infrastructure would also be duplicated. Each ISP needs their own TV receiving equipment (likely a few satellite dishes on top of their data centre), encoding equipment, marketing, private IP multicast network, and whatnot.

With regards to content lock-in, this will also mean that the ISP you choose to use will determine what IPTV channels you are able to watch. Conversely, what IPTV channels you want to watch will determine which ISP you will sign up with.

That sounds all rosy, until you consider that I am not restricted on what websites I can visit based on what ISP I am with. I can watch YouTube or ABC iView from any ISP in Australia. Sure, some ISPs offer better services than others, faster speeds, or more reliable connections, but it’s just the one Internet. This is because the ISP is not in the content provider role. They are merely the gateway to the Internet — the Internet service provider (now where have I heard that term before?).

The way IPTV looks like it is heading is shifting the ISP onto the content provider role. As I’ve already said, this means the service is delivered over the ISP’s private network, available exclusive to that ISP’s customers, and not over the Internet. That’s a Bad Thing™ in terms of net neutrality.

If an ISP “rebroadcasts” content from an IPTV channel that another ISP has signed an exclusive deal on, that would be a copyright violation.

But that still doesn’t explain the title of my post: “Multicast versus IPTV”. The above isn’t actually the crux of what I wanted to get at (apologies to the reader if you’ve managed to read this far in great detail).

I’m supportive of multicast in general. Combined with IPv6 (each /64 subnet has a corresponding multicast subnet), multicast opens up the doorway for anybody to serve high definition audio and video to the Internet at large without the need for exorbitant amounts of bandwidth up their sleeve.

But that’s public multicast. These “IPTV” solutions will be, and currently are, deployed on private multicast networks. On the plus site, private multicast networks mean it is easier for the ISP to deploy the infrastructure — it’s much easier to only have to worry about your own network, than also have to worry about interfacing with others. But it also means less incentive to deploy a public multicast infrastructure, and less incentive for content providers (such as TV networks) to provide their services over multicast themselves. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

We don’t need ISPs to “provide IPTV services”. We need a decent multicast network (preferably IPv6) that all Australians can access, so that TV stations themselves can provide the multicast streams with the knowledge that a large percentage of Internet subscribers are able to access their content, and that channel availability discrimination does not occur based on what ISP you choose to sign up with.

That’s the crux of what I’m getting at. I’m sure someone will come along and say “but but but…they have a right to sign exclusive contracts and deliver only over private networks”. My response to that would be that just because you have the right, doesn’t make it right. Nor left.

Thoughts?