TV Internet

In the past, television was only distributed via cable, satellite, or terrestrial systems. Internet TV is basically defined as the ability to view video streams over the Internet. The primary models for Internet television are streaming Internet TV or selectable video on an Internet location, typically a website.

Today - with the increase in Internet connection speeds, advances in technology, the increase of total number of people online, and the decrease in connection costs - it has become increasingly common to find traditional television content accessible freely and legally over the Internet.
In addition to this, new Internet-only television content has appeared which is not distributed via cable, satellite, or terrestrial systems. Internet television utlizes the connnections of the Internet to deliver video from a source to a target device. Some of the ways in which Internet delivered television is used include:

• watching on a regular TV (via a direct connection from a computer or a Set-top box), or on a computer, or on a portable device (such as a mobile phone)
• show a channel 'live' (like regular TV), or allow the viewer to select a show to watch on demand ("Video-on-Demand" or VOD).
• allows low budget, home camcorder productions to expensive professional productions to be viewed
• The variations of the medium are fairly broad allowing forcopy protected streams or streams that can be recorder.

Sources for Internet TV can be free, subscription or paid sites or supported by advertisements. The barriers to wider adoption of Internet television was streaming technology and bandwidth limitations. The bandwidth issue primarily meant that streams were using low bandwidth and that resulted in poor quality. The BBC's Dirac project seeks to address the technological barriers by creating a scalable, high-quality, free codec for streaming video content over the net.
As Internet television becomes more pervasive, efforts are being made by companies to develop the transmission of existing pay-TV channels to regular TV sets over the net, while retaining control over how the media is used.
Such control is required in order to protect existing subscription and pay-per-view business models. Additionally, there are the copyright issues associated with the distribution of media, like video. The challenges lie in seeking to maintain the protections of a copyright and the revenues associated with it, while moving to another delivery model for video content.