Could the internet cope if all TV is IP?
Sky is killing off the satellite dish, streaming is king. James O’Malley investigates whether the internet could handle all our television viewing
S ince 1990, Sky has been one of the biggest names in British broadcasting. Sky boxes can be found under TVs in 12 million homes around the country, offering viewers access to dozens of TV channels delivered via satellite. Which is why last October it made a change that was both dramatic, yet strangely unsurprising: Sky is ditching the dish.
With Sky Glass, the company launched its first ever television. But instead of plugging into a satellite receiver on the subscriber’s roof, all content will be delivered to the new TV via streaming – including traditional linear channels. (A Freeview receiver is provided for backup only.)
Whether this marks the end of the dish entirely remains to be seen, but it’s yet another sign that the writing is on the wall for traditional broadcast TV, and towards a future where all TV is delivered over IP.
So, if TV viewing is headed exclusively online, will the internet infrastructure cope?
Imagining a streaming world
“In theory, there is sufficient bandwidth,” according to Professor Steve Uhlig, who studies networks at Queen Mary, University of London. “Maybe not for 4K, but even for a few megabits per second, that’s really not the problem, technically speaking.”
The problem, says Uhlig, is getting the bandwidth to where it’s needed. Bandwidth needs to be provisioned and leased by ISPs and broadcasters ahead of time, as it doesn’t scale automatically with demand. “They need to lease pipes that are good enough for the number of custo mers that are being served through that physical infrastructure,” he said. “It’s not like the bandwidth is not there, or the capacity is not available. It’s just it costs money.”
There is still a big question mark over whether there’s enough bandwidth to cope for those big appointment viewing occasions, however. Existing infrastructure would be pushed to its limits if 100% of viewers streamed a major sporting final or something such as the Prime Minister’s lockdown announcement.
“If we [had] delivered the entirety of Euro 2020 online in 2021, the internet would not have been big enough to carry it,” said Richard Cooper, controller of digital distribution and the head of the BBC’s Online Technology Group. “To try and do that today would be bonkers.”
“When you have this one big event where millions of customers... are going to watch, that means your capacity must be provisioned to handle this,” said Uhlig, explaining that in normal times, last-mile bandwidth isn’t a problem as it’s spread out, and demand for services is predictable. But if demand surges, such as during the Euro 2020 final, that theory no longer holds true.
Uhlig said ISPs will generally provision their network bandwidth based on the number of users multiplied by average bandwidth consumption, no matter what the headline connection speed they’re selling might be. “People don’t realise that, most of the time, the average capacity you have is very limited,” he added. “I’ve got supposedly 100Mbits/sec, [but] there’s no bloody way I ever have 100Mbits/sec except for a few seconds, and on average I’m being capped. They [ISPs] know there is no reason I’m going to use more than this on average.”
Luckily then, broadcast TV still exists and can shoulder the appointment viewing burden. But this is slowly changing. According to the BBC, around 15-20% of viewing currently takes place via iPlayer streaming – including both live viewing and catch-up.
Building out the network
At some point, the remaining 80% of viewing will inevitably move to streaming too. The good news is that, behind the scenes, the technology that makes streaming work is improving too.
“I think the amount of engineering we’ve got to do to get ourselves there is an imaginable amount of engineering, as I see it now, compared with what I’ve considered to be completely unimaginable back in 2003, when I started,” said Cooper, explaining that he remembers how the BBC passed a gigabit-per-second of streaming video in around 2013 – and now handles over a terabit per second.
“That was a factor of a thousand growth just in our service delivery, that we managed to do in around a ten-year period,” he said. “We don’t need to achieve that level of growth again.”
The next stage of growth may be easier too, as content delivery networks (CDNs) have created data centres around the world that will make it easier to meet growing demand. “We have data centres very close by, especially when we are in cities like London or New York, so the distance that [data] has to go between you and whoever is going to deliver that heavy bandwidth video is very limited,” said Uhlig.
We can also expect incremental technical improvements in how video is squeezed into the internet’s pipes. “Nearly all video delivered over the internet – over 99% – is efficiently encoded using standards such as H.264, H.265, VP9 and (now) AV1,” said Dane Knecht, SVP of emerging technology and incubation at CDN provider Cloudflare.
“The other half of this, however, is that devices such as [mobile] phones, smart TVs and streaming boxes also need to support those protocols to efficiently ‘decode’ them for viewing,” he added. “So, what we see is advancement in the standards leading to practical deployment and usage by four to five years; this represents typically a generation or two of hardware.”
Paying for it
So we know the transition is going to happen at some point in the future, but this raises one final question: how much will it cost?
One potentially critical issue could be changes to how distribution is priced. Whereas with traditional TV broadcasts the cost of transmission is fixed as everyone receives the same signals from the transmitter, whether one person or ten million are watching, with streaming the data has to be sent to everyone individually. This could mean that the cost of distribution increases with the number of streaming viewers.
Cooper argues this is the wrong way of thinking about it. “Broadcast went through a similar evolution itself. So once upon a time there was one transmitter and now there are considerably more that provide the coverage over the country,” he said. “So there was an investment to build out to get broadcast to scale, and the same thing has to happen in the online world to get online to scale. And we’re part-way through that journey, but we’ve got to wait.”
In fact, this isn’t something he’s worried about, because he expects the technological trends that have underpinned the rise of streaming over the past two decades will continue to improve. “It is a continuous focus on the evolution and improvement and optimisation of every single part of the technology,” he said. “That’s how we’ll get from here to there without breaking the bank.”
If we had delivered the entirety of Euro 2020 online in 2021, the internet would not have been big enough to carry it