iTVP

» see itvp.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2005 Polish public television started broadcasting on a network the public could not reach from an ordinary connection. iTVP, Telewizja Interaktywna, was a research and deployment project inside TVP with a grant number rather than a product launch behind it: project 3184/CT11-6/2002, begun in 2002 after about a year of preparation, aimed at delivering interactive television over Polish optical fiber at national scale.

The architecture is the interesting part. The stream was never meant to travel over the commercial internet. Delivery was planned on PIONIER, the Polish academic optical network, at a guaranteed floor of 750 kilobits per viewer, because that was the rate at which the picture stopped looking like a webcam and started looking like television. ACK Cyfronet AGH in Kraków was the main contractor, working alongside the Warsaw University of Technology and a Warsaw telecoms firm called ATM. Twelve million złoty of the funding came from the science ministry.

The premiere transmission was on 9 January 2005, the thirteenth finale of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, nine months before anyone formally launched anything. The official presentation came on 11 October 2005 at the Warsaw Philharmonic, which is about as far from a product keynote as a launch event gets.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pilot ~

A prototype distribution system went up in 2006 in Warsaw and Kraków, with Poznań as the third city, reaching over fifteen thousand receivers at once. The signal did not all originate in Warsaw either. Regional data centers carried it so the load would spread, which is a content delivery network described in the vocabulary of a broadcast engineer rather than a web one.

Watching it required Windows Media Player and DirectX, and Windows was the only officially supported system. On Linux you could open the free material in Totem or VLC, though not all of it, because some of the free material carried DRM anyway. From 1 May 2008 TVP moved some transmissions to peer-to-peer delivery with the European Broadcasting Union and Octoshape. The first and only broadcasts to use it were speedway league fixtures.

~ 125,000 people, mostly in Japan ~

The Opole song festival went out live on 10 June 2005 with backstage footage and interviews that were not on the broadcast channels, and it was enormously popular. Then came the Chopin Competition in October. The concerts pulled 125,000 viewers from around the world, the majority of them Japanese.

That is the single best thing iTVP ever did and it explains what public broadcasters kept hoping streaming would be for. A state television archive is full of things with a small, scattered, intensely committed international audience that terrestrial transmission can never find. The Turin Winter Olympics followed, and the Tour de Pologne after that.

~ the redirect ~

By the end of 2007 iTVP was supposed to be a commercial service nationwide, and nobody had settled who would sell it. It might be TVP itself, or it might be the telecoms and cable operators delivering the connection. Whoever it turned out to be would have had to carve out dedicated bandwidth, because the thing still was not designed to run on the open internet.

While that question sat unanswered, ordinary broadband got good enough and YouTube taught everyone that video arrives in a browser without a plan. On 15 December 2008 the itvp.pl domain began pointing at tvp.pl. The project was not cancelled so much as absorbed into the portal that made it unnecessary. Poland in 2005 and Turkey in 2005 were roughly the same kind of place for connection speeds, and TRT never attempted anything remotely this ambitious. Before laughing at iTVP for guessing the architecture wrong, look at what the state broadcaster next door managed in the same years.

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