Abstract

Since 1994 when ABC’s “World News Now,” was first broadcast across the Internet, multimedia dissemination has evolved along distinct and unique paths, resulting in two distribution methods that are commonly used across todays Internet, namely Over-the-Top Television (OTT-TV) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). With an increasing amount of video content available online, the future of television is increasingly moving towards the Internet. The barriers to widespread deployment of OTT services are now understood and well on the way to being solved. OTT Television has the potential to transform the face of the television industry by creating new business opportunities for existing stakeholders and facilitating many new entrants. With the quality of Over-the-Top services rapidly approaching that of Quality of Service enabled IPTV services it is proposed that the two could be combined into a unified architecture.This paper documents the two technologies and how they are used in the distribution of multimedia data, namely video. A newly implemented test bed environment is documented along with further work.