Peer-to-Peer IPTV Services

IPTV promises to be within the spectrum of services offered in the future Internet. In cooperative IPTV, clients' resources are typically used to build a scalable system to distribute TV content. One of the major challenges of this approach is to reach the same quality of service of traditional television and commercial IPTV by employing only best effort network layer services. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on P2P networking for cooperative IPTV. Challenges are discussed and some solutions are proposed as part of the architecture. The aim is to make this type of system more competitive with traditional television and commercial IPTV.