From Socalwifi.org

IP Televison Project

Content capture/recording & encoding / distribution (IPTV)

You need to obtain the content from the broadcasters. This can be done via Satellite and Fiber. Probably want some a couple mid range servers with capture cards to essentially grab content off the feed and shove it to mythtv as fast as possible.

Something to store the raw content until it's encoded. Maybe a set of servers hosting a ram based squid cache?

The content needs to be encoded and prepared for distribution. MythTV is fantastic for this. You could setup MythTV with a distributed set of back end nodes to record every channel you are capable of receiving constantly. Also Myth could be used to encode user genarated content.

The content needs to be distributed to users via IP. The content might be watched via a mobile device, the web or VLC.