Internet Television and how it works

Welcome to the world of Internet Television. Here you can find everything about Internet TV. We'll discuss the best programmes and software and we'll keep you up to date with the latest news. With lots of general information on Internet TV and many links to Internet TV related websites we hope to help you find what you're looking for.

Internet television is a television service distributed via the internet. Internet TV, or Online TV, is different from WebTV and Internet protocol television (IPTV). Internet TV has become very popular in recent years.

Internet television allows the users to choose what they want to watch from an archive of programs or from a channel directory. The two forms of viewing Internet television are streaming the content directly to a media player or simply downloading the program to the user's computer. With the "TV on Demand" market growing, these on-demand websites or applications are a must have for major television broadcasting stations. For example, the BBC iPlayer brings in users which stream more than one million videos per week, with one of the BBC's headline shows The Apprentice taking over three percent to five percent of the UK's internet traffic due to people watching the first episode on the BBC iPlayer.

Every night the use of on-demand live television peaks at around 10 pm. Most providers of the service provide several different formats and quality controls so that the service can be viewed on many different devices. Some services now offer a HD service along side their SD, streaming is the same but offers the quality of HD to the device being used, as long as it is using a HD screen. During Peak times the BBC iPlayer transmits 12 GB (gigabytes) of information per second. Over the course of a month the iPlayer sends 7 PB (petabytes) of information.

Before 2006, most internet television services used peer-to-peer (P2P) networking, in which users download an application and data is shared between the users rather than the service provider. Now most service providers have moved away from the peer-to-peer systems and are now using only streaming media. The old peer-to-peer service was selected because the existing infrastructure could not handle the bandwidth which is necessary for centralized streaming distribution. Some consumers didn't like their upload bandwidth being consumed by their video player, which partially motivated the rollout of centralized streaming distribution.