Why should radio and television broadcasters care about IPv6? What potential impact will IPv6 have on broadcasting? How can broadcasters get started learning more about IPv6?
We were very pleased to see that the Society of Broadcast Engineers is offering a live webinar on “IPv6 For Broadcasters” on:
Wednesday, July 11, 2012, from 2:00 – 3:30 US Eastern time
We couldn’t agree more with this part of the session description:
As a broadcaster, if you are providing content to the Internet, IPv6 migration should be considered to enable providing the best Quality of Experience (QoE) to a growing IPv6 content consumer audience without the use of translation schemes. Carriers and Internet service providers utilize translation devices to provide mixed IPv4 and IPv6 interoperability. The various translation schemes are suitable for TCP based applications such as email and web surfing, but can be detrimental to UDP based real-time media used by the broadcaster. In order to provide the best QoE, broadcasters should strive to provide their media content in a native format to IPv6 only users without the need for translation in addition to providing content to the legacy IPv4 users.
Any number of panelists at recent IPv6-related events have discussed the fact that IPv4-to-IPv6 translation services – as well as techniques like carrier-grade-NAT (CGN) to prolong IPv4 usage – introduce latency into the network connection and can degrade the user experience for real-time communications, including streaming media. Making your media available over IPv6 will ensure viewers can see it in the best possible fashion.
Google’s already leading the way with YouTube. Netflix is now offering streaming over IPv6. They will ensure their content is available to users regardless of whether they are on IPv6 or IPv4.
So with that, it’s rather important that other broadcasters understand how they, too, can make their content accessible over IPv6.
This webinar sounds like a great start and we look forward to seeing more broadcasters offering their content over IPv6.
P.S. If you want more info about how to get started with IPv6, take a look at some of the IPv6 resources we’ve included here at our site.
