What Is IPTV? How Does It Work And Why Use It?

With the normal television system, you get to watch what they show you, you really don't have a choice, you have options instead. So out of 100 or so options you get to select what you want to watch. Four options of sport, four of movies, four of cartoon and the list goes on. Come to think of that’s not really a choice.

Well IPTV changes the game completely, giving it a 360-degree turn with the innovation of IPTV set-top boxes.

What is IPTV?

IPTV is quite simple to comprehend: rather than settling for normal tv programs that are being shown on your tv via antenna, cable dish, or fibre-optic medium. IPTV lets you stream them, download them and watch them all at once with the help of IPTV set-top boxes. All this can be done through your internet. But for this your normal internet that is 1-10 Mbps capacity will not work, but rather you will need an internet that has an extensive bandwidth, up to 10-100Mbps.

To be able to do that you will have to get either a tv box, by the name of IPTV set-top boxes, that is a connection between you tv and internet, decoding the signals, so they can work on your television. And other option world be to watch the shows on your laptop. It’s a great innovation that will soon put the old TV system out of business.

How Does IPTV Work?

Watching live on IPTV is easy as you can watch it as they are produced, but when it comes to pre-recorded programs, that’s a bit different. To have them always available to you have to be stored in a different manner. Mostly they have selected programs, not because of little storage but because if they do make all the produced programs available then there will be a considerable pressure on the bandwidth, which will take a toll on the speed of the internet for everyone.

With the help of the IP packets, the TV programs, either live or recorded are send in digital forms. The tv program can be in digital for or SD form, when the TV program, is in SD for, it goes through a time-consuming process to turn it in to a digital one. And you can watch the program through your IPTV set-top boxes.

Also, there is a limit to the bandwidth, which means all the files have to be compressed, for smooth streaming, or else it will take a lot of time loading, and would keep buffering.

Why Use It?

The future of IPTV seems very bright, for the fact that BBC iplayer has been very much appreciated by the people. Pay-per-view will be the in trend of the future. Though it’s had to comment on before experiencing, but to think that you can watch whatever, and whenever and you don't have to depend on the tv schedule to watch your favourite program, seems like a refreshing change, doesn’t it?

Redefining themselves in the name of innovation has been done for decades now, IPTV is the same, it’s an innovative upgrade of regular TV in to a cooler version using internet.