Customers are usually not directly connected to the central office of the IPTV broadcasting service provider but through the nearest relay station or branch office. In this branch office, broadcasts originating from the head office are combined with local content, such as television channels, advertisements, and video on demand (VoD). This is also where an iptv canada middleware is placed.
IPTV middleware is a collection of software that serves customer authentication, channel change requests, billing, VoD requests, and others. All IPTV broadcast channels are sent to relay stations simultaneously, which usually causes a bottleneck effect there.
This bottleneck is due to the limited bandwidth of DSL, which is not able to deliver all channel video streams to subscribers at the same time. This is not the case with cable television, because the availability of cable bandwidth reaches up to 4.5 Gbps. While ADSL2+ is the newest one, it is only able to provide bandwidth in the range of 25 Mbps.
So, how do relay stations send hundreds of IPTV broadcast channels to subscribers using DSL internet lines? The relay station only transmits one IPTV broadcast channel at a time. When a customer changes the channel by pressing a button on the remote control, for example, the decoder does not tune like conventional and cable televisions.
What happens next is the decoder changes the channel using IP Group Membership Protocol (IGMP) v2 to enter the new multicast group. When the relay station accepts this change, the middleware will re-authenticate, whether the customer in question has indeed subscribed to the new channel he wants.
Next, the middleware instructs the router at the relay station to add the subscriber data to the channel distribution list. Thus, only the signal requested by the subscriber is sent by the relay station to the subscriber’s television set.
The biggest obstacle in implementing IPTV is bandwidth limitations. Since IPTV does not use public frequency signals, licensing issues will not be as difficult as setting up a transmitting tower for conventional television stations. While in countries known to be strict with Internet content censorship, of course, there will be additional regulations for IPTV broadcast providers.
