Internet TV

Internet - An international network of networks, originally started for military purposes, that connects millions of users instantaneously through commonly-used protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, etc. The widely-used World Wide Web is available through the Internet.

Internet TV - In the past, television was only distributed by cable, satellite, or terrestrial systems. The primary models for Internet television are streaming Internet TV or selectable video on an Internet location, typically a website.

Today -- with the increase in Internet connection speeds, advances in technology, the increase of total number of people online, and the decrease in connection costs -- it has become increasingly common to find traditional television content accessible freely and legally over the Internet. In addition to this, new Internet-only television content has appeared which is not distributed via cable, satellite, or terrestrial systems.

Internet television utilizes the connections of the Internet to deliver video from a source to a target device. Some of the ways in which Internet delivered television is used include:

watching on a regular TV (via a direct connection from a computer or a Set-top box), or on a computer, or on a portable device (such as a mobile phone)
showing a channel 'live' (like regular TV), or allow the viewer to select a show to watch on demand ("Video-on-Demand" or VOD).
viewing anything from low budget, home camcorder productions to expensive professional productions
Interactive advertising
The medium supports very broad variation, allowing for copy protected streams or streams that can be recorded. Sources of Internet TV can be free, subscription- or fee-based, or supported by advertisements.

The barriers to wider adoption of Internet television in the past have been streaming technology and bandwidth limitations. The bandwidth issue primarily meant that streams were using low bandwidth and that resulted in poor quality. The BBC's Dirac project seeks to address the technological barriers by creating a scalable, high-quality, free codec for streaming video content over the net.

As Internet television becomes more pervasive, some companies have made efforts to develop the transmission of existing pay-TV channels to regular TV sets over the net, while retaining control over how the medium is used. Such control is required in order to protect existing subscription and pay-per-view business models. Additionally, there are the copyright issues associated with the distribution of all media. The challenges lie in seeking to maintain the protections of a copyright and the revenues associated with it, while moving to another delivery model for video.

Internet Video on Demand (VOD) offers a different approach, and it is interactive, requiring the viewer to select specific videos to watch. The usage of internet protocols to provide two-way communication will also open the way for interactivity with the video content, for example making it possible to choose between multiple camera angles, vote on an interactive TV show while watching it, or order a product sample

Free Internet Television is available from the Web, and is accessible without the need for either a set-top-box, a specific carrier or an operator. It is easily viewed by connecting the television set to the video output of the computer and accessing the streaming video.

The greatest core theme of the free Internet Television model is that it is based on the same publishing model that exists on the Web: it allows access to an open platform, that anyone can access, use and build for, together with the development of open source software, open standards and formats.The first country in the world to have its own Internet TV model was Cyprus, which launched Cyprusitv.com in March 2006. This project was created by Dean Di Libero using the Narrowstep telvOS operating system

Those that create valued and interesting video products have now the opportunity to distribute them directly to a large audience - something impossible with the previous television distributing models (closed software, closed hardware, closed network). The free model has been used around the globe by local and independent television channels aiming for niche target audiences, or to build a collaborative environment for media production, a platform for citizens' media. It isn't strictly a citizen's format either as the broadcast model used in television for decades will begin to find competition in Internet television supported by advertising.