BBC and ITV trial online TV channels
A six-month technical trial is beginning now which sees the Beeb and ITV team to up to test a potential new internet based TV delivery system. The technology is called ‘Multicasting’ and it works by feeding the transmission straight to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) so that it can then be responsible for redistribution to subscribers, thus helping to share out the heavy bandwidth load.
Four thousand testers are going to be recruited to trial the service which should see main channels BBC 1, 2, 3, 4 and News 24 and ITV 1, 2, 3 and 4 distributed online.
Whilst there hasn’t been any direct mention of plans to deliver HDTV through this mechanism, we do know that the BBC is planning on rolling out high def content possibly as early as June and, as broadband speeds creep ever upwards, by the time the trial nears completion this could become a very real possibility. Receiving HDTV via broadband would require an internet connection speed somewhere between 8Mbps and 14Mbps
The only problem with multicasting is 1) it's hugely time-consuming to set up EVERY single router in the path from the broadcast server to the end user to support multicast, some routers can't support proper multicast so they either have to be upgraded or replaced (again at big cost), and some institutions just don't want to support multicast streaming.
For example, I'm at uni in Birmingham, on the Janet network (one of the UK's core networks and one which supports multicasting on its core network) - but my Uni's network doesn't support multicast, and I don't think it will for the foreseeable future.
Until every ISP follows the lead of Zen and AAISP (and the scant few fothers listed on the BBC Multicast pages), I highly doubt this will reach critical mass in terms of usage. My friend is on Zen, but he had to upgrade his router to a firmware supporting multicast - it worked then, but if everybody has to do some form of upgrading, crossgrading or manual patching just to do this, it's going to stay niche, at least until IPv6 becomes mandatory.
Posted by: Christopher | April 8, 2006 9:07 PM