Experiments with Delivery of HDTV over IP Networks

The conversion of broadcast television from the legacy analog PAL and NTSC standards to digital format has many exciting implications. These include the possible convergence of television distribution and computer network infrastructures, allowing interactive applications, and the increase in quality possible with high definition digital formats.

To date, the different aspects of this convergence have been studied in isolation: there has been much work on the transport of compressed standard definition TV over IP, and much work defining protocols and standards for high definition TV (HDTV), but few have studied the transport of HDTV over IP. In this paper we present our initial experiments with a system to deliver production quality uncompressed HDTV over IP networks.

Why do we chose to deliver uncompressed HDTV? Several reasons, primarily to maintain image quality and reduce latency. This is most useful in a production facility, where image degradation due to repeated compression cycles is undesirable, but may also be appropriate for very high quality telepresence applications. Delivery of compressed HDTV, using existing MPEG-2 over IP standards, may be more appropriate for other applications.

The outline of this paper is as follows: section 2 covers background in HDTV technology, protocols for transport of video over IP networks and network performance. This is followed, in section 3 with a discussion of the options for protocol development, with our design being outlined in section 4. Section 5 provides preliminary performance analysis of our system, demonstrating transmission of HDTV over a wide-area IP network, with section 6 outlining directions for further development. Finally, we summarize related work in section 7, and provide conclusions.

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