iiNet has become the first Internet Service Provider certified to deliver multicast-based Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services over the National Broadband Network (NBN).

iiNet Chief Product Officer Stephen Harley said the successful multicast certification process demonstrates the iiNet Group’s commitment to the NBN. “The NBN Multicast service lets us deliver awesome, high quality video entertainment to our customers, such as our innovative Fetch TV service,” he said.

iiNet, TransACT, WestNet, Netspace and Internode completed NBN Co’s multicast certification process in November, allowing delivery of IPTV-based services, such as Fetch TV, as multicast is progressively phased in over the NBN. As its first initiative, iiNet will take part in a ground-breaking multicast IPTV delivery trial planned by NBN Co at a Greenfields site in Rhodes, NSW. For this trial iiNet will use the Fetch TV service.

“We’re looking forward to delivering fantastic IPTV services to even more of our NBN customers as it becomes available,” Harley said.

NBN Multicast is a data transmission technology for delivering high quality video and IPTV services. As well as transporting large, scalable volumes of video data, multicast incorporates Quality of Service (QoS) to protect the bandwidth required for a high definition IPTV video stream. Multicasting reduces traffic costs and congestion while maintaining quality by conveying video as a single stream as far into the network as possible before delivering to multiple individual customers.