Ubiquitous TV Delivery to the Masses

The vision of ubiquitous delivery of TV streams to the masses at high quality is tantalizing. However, today, TV streaming is either limited to fixed wired outlets (IPTV), or it is distributed over DVB-x but the required receivers are not built into their devices. Wireless mesh networks have the potential to bridge this gap, as they can receive the TV from either technology and forward it over multi- ple hops to the user devices that are today equipped with 802.11 cards by default. This paper describes the set up of a TV streaming over the Magnets mesh network deployed in the city of Berlin. Initial performance evaluations on the Magnets backbone and the Magnets indoor mesh show that a combination of careful engineering and multi-card wire- less routers can provide sufficient bandwidth to support TV streaming over wireless networks.