Open IPTV Forum formed to develop IPTV standards

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 20 March 2007 02:21

Business IT - Technology

AT&T, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Siemens, Sony, and Telecom Italia have formed the Open IPTV Forum, an industry consortium that will work to define an interoperable end-to-end specification for the delivery of IPTV services.

The Forum will "focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies, and help to maximise the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers."

The Forum says it has set an aggressive timetable that aims to produce requirements and architecture specifications by September 2007 and first release of protocol specifications by December 2007.

To achieve this, Forum members intend to make use of the work done in existing standards bodies, where these are applicable. The results of this work will be fed to ongoing standardisation activities through member contributions.

Other industry participants wil be invited to join the forum, but not until the initial specs have been produced. The Forum will initially consist of the nine founding member companies "to ensure speed and coherence in achieving a first release." Detailed information regarding additional members will be provided later in 2007.

The initial composition of the Forum is dominated by European companies but, in the Q&A on its web site, it denies any regional bias: "The Forum targets to specify a common and open end-to-end IPTV platform that can be applied globally. The Forum will be open for participation to any companies which share the goals of the Forum and are willing to actively contribute to specification development

A number of standards bodies are already addressing specific elements of IPTV, but the Open IPTV Forum says it will work to aggregate these diverse standards into a complete delivery solution, with the goal of accelerating the full standardisation of IPTV-related technologies. The Open IPTV Forum plans to establish requirements and architecture specifications as well as protocol specifications later in 2007.
 
It aims to ensure interoperability between consumer equipment and services compliant to the Open IPTV Forum's specification so that end users will be able to easily access their choice of contents and services among multiple service providers. The Forum will also address key technology elements such as content protection, necessary interfaces that allow IPTV services to be delivered over both managed network environment and the public Internet, and adequate measures to ensure interoperability between such services and retail consumer devices.

Candidates include, but are not limited to: IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA). The forum is at http://www.openiptvforum.org