Wireless IPTV? Some Say Yes

Wireless networks are ideal for IPTV because they're far less expensive than fiber or cable to connect to subscribers’ homes, said Mark Evensen, founder and chief technology officer of Entone. “It’s much cheaper than fiber and it can be much more robust than DSL,” he said. “It’s a really good network for video distribution.” When Verizon introduces its LTE network, it will offer download speeds between 5 and 12 Mbps, the company has said. “You can imagine a home gateway that is taking an LTE interface and then converting everything into IP in the home, and piping it over coax or even Wi-Fi,” Evensen said. Then the video can be distributed to TV sets, DVRs, PCs or mobile devices, he said.

IPTV is possible over a wireless network, but it would present challenges, said Aseem Bakshi, vice president of product management for SeaChange International. The beauty of IPTV is that the underlying transport doesn’t matter, he said. “For many aspects of it, the fact that it’s running on LTE or WiMAX starts becoming basically irrelevant,” Bakshi said. “As long as it is IP, the system will work.” To offer a fully managed IPTV product with guaranteed quality of service, operators would have to invest in significant storage and encoding equipment, particularly to deliver video to screens of different sizes on various devices, he said. Between the various bitrates and encoding formats needed to reach all the devices, a service provider may need up to 12 differently encoded versions of a piece of video programming to provide a good end-user experience, he said.

Video is one of the main reasons that wireless operators are deploying 4G networks, said Sylvain Boyer, director of marketing for Alcatel-Lucent’s Multimedia Integration Group. “Certainly when thinking about LTE and talking to the carriers, they are very much investing in LTE because they feel there is a strong business case for a number of applications that will be monetized on the 4G network,” he said. “Many of those certainly rotate around video.” But providing the guaranteed service levels that a competitive IPTV offering would need -- such as the ability to deliver multiple, simultaneous HD program streams to several devices in the home -- would be too expensive, Boyer said. “If we try to match” a wired IPTV “experience, we'd be looking at five to six users per LTE carrier, which becomes really too expensive to offer,” he said. A typical LTE base station has about six carriers, he said.

A competitive IPTV service would need to provide 15-20 Mbps to each household, said John Reister, chief IPTV architect for BigBand Networks. Even if in-home IPTV isn’t immediately feasible, 4G networks operators will be able to offer compelling video services outside the home, he said. “But it’s going to have to be marketed differently than someone who’s trying to compete for someone with seven TV sets in their house.” Besides, U.S. TV viewing habits and 4G network management needs aren’t aligned, he said. “A lot of people leave their TVs on all the time, and it’s a stupendous waste of wireless bandwidth to potentially be taking up 5 Mbps to that consumer for hours and hours when there might not even be somebody sitting in front of the TV."

With over-the-top video from sources such as Netflix, Hulu and YouTube sure to swamp 4G networks, operators will look for ways to monetize the video carried on their networks, Reister said. Sandvine has estimated that Netflix streaming traffic already accounts for as much as 20 percent of Internet bandwidth use in the U.S. at 8-10 p.m. (CD Nov 15 p6). “There’s definitely a need for some video smarts in this network, that essentially sits at the edge of the operators’ networks, looks at all the video streams going through, and managing them in a way that maximizes quality and tries to ensure some fairness to users,” Reister said. “Paying for all this, the linchpin is advertising.” The larger the role the network operator plays in managing and delivering video, the more likely it can get a share of ad revenue to help cover the costs, he said.

Some vendors are working on multicast and broadcast technology that would be compatible with IPTV, said Felts. That way, popular programming could be broadcast and niche content unicast to users, creating bandwidth efficiencies, he said. But devices would have to be equipped with broadcast receivers, he said. In Malaysia, Sezmi is working with a wireless operator on just such a service. It said in October it entered a partnership with a WiMAX operator to deliver an in-home and mobile hybrid broadcast-IPTV service.