Network Delivery Mechanisms - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 333

19

Network Delivery Mechanisms

19.1 Time to Show and Tell

So we have some content that has been lovingly crafted and carefully compressed. Now it
is time to ship it out to the consumer. How is it going to get there?
This chapter examines how to deliver your video clips once you have encoded them.
There are a variety of ways to do this. Principally, this comes down to a small number of
possibilities with variations on the following basic themes:

Broadcast them over a digital TV network

●

Stream them over the Internet

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Download them over a network as files

●

A number of transport mechanisms that exist to deliver video content are based on
digital-transmission techniques and all of them are remarkably similar. Where they differ it is
in the amount of bit rate or the way that content is unicast on some and multicast on others.
Table 19-1 summarizes some common bit rates available on different kinds of con-
nections.

19.2 Delivery on Multipurpose Networks

Delivering video services over telephone networks is becoming possible as the available
network bandwidth into the home increases. Multipurpose networks provided by the
digital TV cable companies are also supporting data services and the number of tele-
phone services being provided through the same wire is also increasing. That is quite
apart from the voice over IP services. Within a few years, most communications services
will be delivered to the home over a TCP/IP-based infrastructure. Routers instead of
telephone-exchange switchgear will be far easier to maintain and cheaper to deploy.
However, some work remains to be done to make sure it is all resilient and reliably
implemented.
It is certainly feasible to eventually deliver totally integrated Web, radio, TV, and
telephone functionality to a variety of devices in the home via a single connection.

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